Free kindergarten math ebook

Renee from SchoolSparks.com is offering a totally free ebook for kindergarten math! It basically is a worksheets collection for K, colorful and beautiful.

The book covers number recognition, counting, patterns, sorting and classifying, and an introduction to graphs, and has 53 pages.

In addition to this very nice e-book, Renee also has hundreds of free kindergarten worksheets for parents and teachers to download and use at home or in the classroom.

Fact families on a whiteboard

I just found this picture that I took of the fact families my 4-year old wrote on the whiteboard - totally on her own.



There was a time she loved writing fact families like this every day. Being able to choose different color markers plus it being on the whiteboard seemed to be the main motivating factors, because she didn't want to write them on blank paper... Kids are funny.

Then again, it allows us teachers to use colorful markers as a "motivational tool" : )

Anyway, I was really happy that she had grasped the concept.

Learn to recognize coins

Image by Stopnlook

In the past few days I decided it's time for my younger girl to start learning how to recognize coins and learn the cent-values of various coins. She's generally been doing kindergarten-1st grade addition and subtraction and I figured she's ready.

First, I got a pile of pennies, a pile of nickels, and a pile of dimes (no quarters at first). We played where I told her to make a certain amount, such as "Make 24 cents." She made it, I checked. Then she told me to make some amount. We just take turns.

It's like a game, and great fun for her! I figure it'll work the same with other kindergarten or 1st grade kids.

Since she did pretty good, I was able to introduce quarters the next day. I showed her that two of them makes 50, and we practiced making 62 or 58 or other such amounts that use 2 quarters.

Then I showed her a quarter and a nickel, and we figured out how much that was. That's always a difficult thing - to combine just one quarter with other coins. I soon asked her to make 30 cents, or 32 - and she was able to use the quarter and nickel combination to make 30 cents.

One important thing I've done is that I have deliberately NOT yet introduced the words "nickel", "dime", and "quarter". She's heard of the penny so much that she was fine with that. I want to scaffold the teaching so that we'll first learn the coin values, and later the customary names.

So, in essence, for now I've been calling them as "5-cent coin", "10-cent coin", and "25-cent coin". Has anyone else done that?

Sticker Math Fun (K-2)

When I was a kid, my mom sometimes bought my brother and me activity books to fill up our summer time. Well, if you're into activity books, here's a Sticker Math Fun by Usborne that I can recommend for summer math learning and practice (grades K-2) (or for later in the school year as well, for that matter).

It has different mathematically-sound activities for addition, subtraction, beginning multiplication, fractions and clock, mostly on about 1st grade level but some for kindergarten and some for 2nd.

It is filled with quite variable and creative activities, and not just dull simple adding and subtracting. The activities include missing addends or subtrahends, number patterns, finding numbers that add up to a certain number, and so on.

It is in full color with kid-friendly imagery.

We bought this book several months ago, and I can say my kindergartner-1st grader has really enjoyed the book! And the third grader has wanted to do several pages as well.

The normal price is $15, but this morning when I checked, you can get copies from Amazon marketplace sellers for less than $5 (with shipping)! Go check it out!

Kindergarten math

People occasionally ask me about kindergarten math, and if I'm going to write kindergarten level books for the Math Mammoth series. The answer is no, I don't feel there's any need for me to write books, because there already exist plenty of good materials for these very basic and easy concepts.

BUT I did write a comprehensive article about what you can do in kindergarten math, including many games you can play, and what basic concepts should be covered in order to prepare for 1st grade.

Kindergarten question

How to teach subtraction in the kindergarten with the tens place values and in horizontal sequence, for eg, 20-5=? They know to count their fingers, from the smaller number to the bigger number, but when the fingers are not enough to count, then what?

I'm not sure kindergartners are necessary ready for this. I would ONLY do these types of problems with concrete help.

Get a 100-bead abacus. Instruct them to first "make" 20 or show 20 on the abacus, and then move 5 away. Then "see" how many are left.

This online abacus is also really good for illustrating such.

Once they've done 20 - 5 and many other problems, you can ask if they notice a similarity in these problems:

10 - 5

20 - 5

50 - 5

70 - 5

etc.

But if some don't, wait till 1st grade. Practicing problems that "cross the ten" without manipulatives, such as 23 - 5 or 71 - 9, can wait even till 2nd. I realize kids might be able to do them by counting down, but to learn effective strategies for solving these kind of problems, children need a good foundation of place value (tens and ones), and that doesn't come immediately.

I'd use addition problems first, and a little easier ones, such as

20 + 7

44 + 2

62 + 7

and so on. These can help cement the place value concept as well, if you approach them right, such as, "62 has 6 tens and 2 ones, and then you add 7 more ones. Can you do that on the abacus, or with your ten-bundles and sticks, etc.?

With subtraction, try problems that "stay" within the same ten, such as 65 − 3. The idea is to use concrete aids and help them see they don't need to "touch" the whole tens when subtracting, so it's really similar to doing 5 − 3.

But still, I feel even this is not essential for kindergarten but can wait till first grade.