First Grade, Math, Set Two

Games, activities, books, and web sites that enhanced our learning:

• What is Symmetry? by Mindel and Harry Sitomer -- we started this book in Set One, and finished it this week. I skipped the information on point symmetry, but we had fun playing in front of the mirrors in her room, learning about plane symmetry. K. enjoyed the activities in the first part of the book, so we did a few of them again.
• Fun with Patterns by Peter Patilla -- this book has you finding certain patterns in pictures
• Take a Guess: A Look at Estimation -- this is a good book for introducing this subject
• Here are a couple games for learning to tell time: Time Clock and What Time is It?
• This week we had a field trip, so to incorporate our math time into it, I had scheduled "Identify Numbers to 999" on that day. This is something you can do while driving. Most license plates have a series of three numbers and you can take turns reading them aloud. You can make it a bit more challenging by having the rule that whatever number one ends with, the next has to start with. For example: if K. says three hundred thirty-two, then I need to find a number that starts with 2, like two hundred seventy-eight, and she would need to find a number that begins with an eight, and so on.
• Remember that there is no "and" in these numbers. You only put an "and" in where there is a decimal point.
• We started counting by 2's this week. We practiced by counting paper clips, colored pencils (she has 71), and counting the pages in books she has read -- for her reading incentive chart.

• For practice with "First, Next, Last, Before, After, Between", I pulled out the pictures from the story The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. K. put the pictures in order as I helped her tell the story, with ". . . happened first" and lots of "next" and finally "last". However, there were some pictures that didn't get used because I had left some things out of the story, so we had to go back and decide what these pictures went before or after or between.
• You can pick up books at the thrift shop to cut up and use for this type of work.

• We did Number Stories (Games for Math) on the way to the aquarium.
• Here are a couple good books about fractions:
• Fractions by Penny Dowdy (from the My Path to Math series)
• If You Were a Fraction by Trisha Speed Shaskan
• We used our Unifix Cubes to learn "10 More/10 Less". K. caught on real well. I stressed that since we were adding or subtracting 10, the only number that changed was the number in the tens column.
• We have been doing Triangles (addition only) almost every day during this set. K. has gotten really fast on giving the answers.
• We played a really close game of Group 10 (Games for Math pg 155), which was also a lesson in being a good sport.
• This week we played games to practice our addition facts: Number Ladder (Games for Math pg 71), Fast Track (Games for Math pg 72), Math Checkers (Games for Math pg 79), and Double It (Games for Math pg 77).