This past Wednesday the kindergartners and their counselors made stars. These were made from paper rhombuses, which they cut from strips and glued on the backs of the humongous numbers that we made during our last session together.
The idea here is to represent numbers both as numerals and as quantity, so on the back of the “1” there was one big star, made by the two boys at the far end of the table, two stars were on the back of the two, and so on. When we take a look at them next week hopefully we’ll talk about how, as the numbers get bigger, the shapes that represent them get smaller, so that they all fit on the page.
I also brought in flowers from my garden. A petunia, a hollyhock, a zinnia and a wild geranium are pictured here. I wanted the children to look at them and discover things about them which are same and different. My hope is that they learn something about how to describe things precisely. For instance, to say that the hollyhock flower is big means nothing unless there is a context, such as that it’s big compared to the wild geranium, but not so big when compared to Lauren. I loved hearing what the kids noticed about the flowers. Maybe next week I will bring in vegetables.
We did a few activities around numbers, that I will continue to develop in the c0ming weeks. We’ll be spending more time working with number value than number recognition, though, as that what seems to be appropriate for this group.
Tracing and labeling fingers to play a finger/numbers game was what we started with. The game that we did around this is based on this research about finger perception 
Lunch, Learn, and Play 