Counting Shells- 5 year old

I gave Jacob a bag of shells to count. He said it would take a year to count all 7 billion shells in the bag. I told him he could organize the shells to help him.

He decided to organize the shells by the look of the shell. I let him do it and just said, "that is one way to do it." He quickly lost count and started over numerous times before telling me he could not do it wil us in the room, we were too distracting. I suggested he organize them in another way to count. He couldn't possible think of any other ways to organize the shells and was getting frustrated so I stepped in. I suggested we put them all together again. He did not like that idea so we kept them in 3 piles. I suggested we do one pile at a time and put them in small groups of 10. Explaining it would be easy to count by 10s. (He does know how to count by 10s. He liked this and put all 3 piles of shells into groups of ten by himself. He ran into a problem when we did not have for a pile of ten. I suggested we put the left overs in a pile to make them in piles of 10. He again, did not like mixing the different shells. So I suggested we count all the one style. I let him count the 10s but jumped in to count the extra as a model for him. 23. He continued to do that for all 3 piles of groups of 10. At the end I asked, "now how do we know the number of shells altogether?" He thought for a while and didn't have ideas. I suggested we keep the groups of ten but all the leftovers together so we can easily and quickly find the total as he is not doing double digit addition yet. When he hears fast and easy, he is on board. We had 72 shells.

This activity was a great way to explore numbers and counting. There was a lot of letting him fail to find the answer. That can be hard sometimes but needs to happen if you want to raise thinkers. We also were able to talk about his complaint at the beginning of the activity. He suggested there were 7 billion shells. We talked about how 72 is a lot but not 7 billion! And we talked about how to easily count a large number of things.

This was a great activity to put Mr. know-it-All 5 year old in his place and show him he still was learning!

Comments

Play to Write- Week 3

We participating in a Wednesday Play Group called Play to Write over at Cherrios and Lattes . This is week 3- Write/Spell Your Name. We started this week's practice with some name tracing. Cherrios and Lattes provides the printable for some dotted letters. She suggested doing rainbow writing with this sheet. I showed Jacob but he was more interested in writing all the Jacobs. I started by modeling on the first name. Then I held his hand and we did it together. Finally I let him do the last three on his own with only my verbal prompts. He took this very seriously and was very proud of himself! I was surprised at how much he liked doing this activity. He has a long way to go but he did pretty well! One thing I had to repeat was not to go around the o and a more than once. He wanted to go around and around. This is an activity that I think he will want to do again! The next activity was Missing Letter Name Practice. We started by singing a little song I sing fo...

Name Writing Practice

Jacob did a little name writing practice today. He was asked to trace the dotted lines to write letters for his name. This is good practice with spelling as well. I had him say each letter as he wrote the letter. As you can see he is very choppy and not exactly on the dotted lines. His motor skills are not quite sharp enough yet to be able to hold the crayon and he especially loses control as he works on towards the end. We also did a Missing Letter Name Practice. Both of these ideas came from Cherrios and Lattes ' Play to Write, Write to Read. These are good ways to practice names and writing. He gets very angry if he thinks he made a mistake. See the scribbling. I have to reinforce that it is ok to make a mistake and that everyone makes mistakes but we just keep trying. Practice is the only way to get better. When this happens I cannot help but think of my former students that did the very same thing and proceeded to throw fits and give up. I hope to help Jacob ge...

Building Good Readers

"Your boys are such good readers! I wish mine loved to read like yours do! How did you do that?" Can parents build good readers? How do parents build good readers? This might seem like a daunting question, a task too difficult to tackle. But truly, it does not have to be. As our children grow and become readers on their own accord they often feel that they do not need or want parents to read to them. It is very common for this to happen, but as their parents, it is our job to push back. Readers are not born, they are made. We must find times to read to our children. That might mean reading aloud looks different as they get older. Maybe instead of before bed; you are reading at the dinner table, as they are playing, or during snack time. The point is to share books that will pique their interest and hold their attention. You might have to choose books you might not otherwise choose. The key to reading aloud is to m odel reading for them and to sho...

Structured Play

Search This Blog