First Grade, Math, Set One

Here are some games and activities that K. really enjoyed:

• Learning Ordinals: Find a Penny, page 52 in Games for Math. We tried this game last year, but it wasn't much fun. This year she had a blast playing it. It also gave her practice in using the terms "closer" and "farther", which I hadn't realized was a difficulty.
• Counting On: Grasshopper in Games for Math. I used numbers 10 - 30. When I would tell her to jump to a number that was 1, 2, or 3 more she did that really easy, but if it was 4, 5, or 6 more, she had to stop and figure it out.

• Story Order. I made this activity up.
• I found pictures that had the same theme (all had a dog and people doing something) on my clip art disk. I printed them out (12 of them), cut them out, and glued them on colorful circles.
• K. picked 10 of the pictures and placed them on the rug -- in two rows of five.
• I had the words "First" through "Tenth" written on paper.
• I mixed the words up and then, starting with the one on top, placed one under each picture, starting at the top left. (The order is still mixed up.)
• Then I picked up the picture that had "First" under it and started telling a story (a few sentences). Then the "Second" picture and continued my story. All the way through "Tenth".
• Then it was my turn to pick the pictures and K. told a story as she picked up the pictures in the ordinal order.

• Park Day is always a great day for Number Stories (Games for Math). This way math can easily be done in the car on the way to the park.
• Dominoes can be turned into a fun math game. I have a pretty set (the tiles are white and the dots are different colors) of double six dominoes. We divide the tiles between us (each gets 14). The person with the double 6 goes first. What makes this a math game is that when you put your tile out, you say the addition or subtraction equation. So when the double 6 is put out the player says "six plus six equal twelve". We usually play twice. Once is addition, and once is subtraction.
• I changed Number Ladder (Games for Math pg 71) so that the numbers on the ladder were 0 through 6 (4, 5, and 6 are there twice) and our spinner has 2 through 6.
• The first half of the year we are concentrating on equations up to 6 + 6 / 6 - 6. The second half of the year we will go up to 12 + 12 / 12 - 12.
• We used buttons and a book instead of paper clips and our hand when we played What Did I Do? (Games for Math page 62) We took turns putting out a number of buttons, then the other player closed their eyes while the first player made a change in the number of buttons (either adding or subtracting). Then the second player had to tell how many buttons had been added or taken away.

• To practice the idea of renaming 10 ones as one 10 we played Group 10 (Games for Math pg 155) and Fifty Wins (Games for Math pg 138). K. won both games!

We use UNO cards for Group 10 and just ignore the cards that have words or the number 0.

• For practice with fractions we went to the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. Under Number & Operations, Pre-K - 2 there are activities where you can create fractions and name fractions. Although I would not classify these as games, K. enjoyed them and the idea of fractions seemed to "click", especially when doing the "Fractions - Parts of a Whole" activity.
• Races (see Kindergarten, Math, Weeks 25, 26, and 27) continue to be K.'s favorite way to practice her addition.
• This week we did Triangles (see Kindergarten, Math, Week 31), only I held the stack of triangles, covering one number with my hand. I put 1/8 cup of yogurt raisins in a bowl. I did not tell her to be fast, only correct. She could use her fingers or the raisins to work out a problem if she wanted to. If she made a mistake, I got a raisin. When we were through, she would get all the raisins left in the bowl. We have 30 or 36 cards -- I only got 4 raisins.
• The day we played Shape Lotto K. wanted to play it three times, which was fine with me. I had made a version that had both 2- and 3-dimensional shapes. She didn't recall the names of all the shapes the first time we played, but by the third time, everything was clicking again.

• To count the number of sides and corners shapes have, I drew shapes on a piece of paper. K. used a green pencil and put an 'x' on each side and circled each corner with a blue pencil. We counted as she marked them.
• For same shape/same size I looked on-line and found some worksheets. I didn't print them out, we just did them on the computer, but it gave me some ideas for a game for the next time we work with shape/size.
• For symmetry, we got a couple books from the library.
• The Shape of Things by Janine Scott -- it only had one page on symmetry, but at the back of the book it had a couple web sites. Primary Games has some fun learning games.
• What is Symmetry? by Mindel and Harry Sitomer -- this is a great book. It has you cutting paper and poking holes and folding things to learn about symmetry. It goes into point symmetry, so we will skip those pages, but we will probably play with plane symmetry -- in front of a mirror!