More or Less: Skittle Graph

One thing that students have a lot of difficulty with in Kindergarten is ordering by count. 

Kids are naturally pretty good at sorting. They can sort by color, size, shape, number of holes on buttons, etc. But when they have to put those sorted piles in order from least to greatest, trouble arises.

I often get piles that go something like 5, 2, 7, 1 instead of 1, 2, 5, 7. Surprisingly, graphing is not something that's expected of kindergartners according to the common core math standards. But I feel like it helps kids see the visual growth when you line things up in tower form.  So, we made a Skittle graph.

I explained to students that they needed to pretend there was a little man on the steps (we called him "Fred"), and that Fred can't easily go up and down because he is so little.  He needs the least amount of variation between steps as possible.  This can only happen if we put our towers in order from least to greatest (or greatest to least), but not when we go up and down and up and down.

You can help students see this at home by doing similar activities - sorting cereal, coins, etc. - and making towers to see ones that are taller, or more, and ones that are shorter, or less.

Observing & Sorting by Weight, Texture

I really enjoy science and math units on sorting.  I'm pretty sure the kids do, too.  They have to think hard about all the different ways to sort, work together and discuss what they're doing out loud, and really look closely at the items they're given.  

I always open with the same lesson: dumping caps all over the floor and seeing what attributes the kids come up with to sort by!  In this picture, they're sorting by caps with ridges on the side and caps with no ridges on the side.  It was a chorus of "Ridges!" "No ridges!" "No ridges!" "Ridges!" as little feet moved frantically around the carpet.

Each day, we've had something different to sort.

Have you ever noticed how much kids love rocks?  I can't blame them; I had a rock collection when I was little that I still cherish to this day.  When I saw that we needed to sort by weight, I knew we had to weigh some rocks.  I didn't know just how well the lesson was going to go! We covered observation, estimation, counting, graphing, sorting and number lines in addition to discussing why some rocks which appear to be the same size differ in weight.  (One of our so-called rocks was actually charred wood, so we had a nice chat on composition too!)

Step 1: Find rocks. Each kid got to find his/her own rock.  Step 2: Explain how a balance scale works. Estimate how many cubes the rock will weigh.  Step 3: Count how many cubes it takes to balance the rock.  Step 4: Place the rock above the numeral showing the number of cubes it weighs.  Step 5: Analyze and discuss the resulting graph.

If your kid brought home a dirty rock, this is why! I had some kids say, "Mom won't let me bring rocks in the house." I told them, "I bet if you can explain why you have it, she'd let you. Just tell her how much it weighs!"  (Says the nearly twenty-seven-year-old who still picks up rocks and pretty leaves on hikes. Le sigh.)

Side note: Aren't you loving this carpet? We are.

Annaley brought us a special treat this week! A baby timber rattlesnake to observe! Don't worry. It was dead. (More specifically, missing a head.) And jarred. But this sparked some great discussion.  We watched a brief video on this type of snake and talked about what we noticed.  My students (and friends and family!) know how much I love snakes. I thought this was so cool.  Let me go ahead and link back to this post when I caught a snake and brought it into school! 

They were so intrigued. 

Today we moved on to exploring our sense of touch more with different textured fabrics.  We found out that our most sensitive skin is on our fingertips, but that any of our skin will respond to touch.  We felt textures with our hands and decided how to sort!

Then we took off our shoes and had a little barefoot fun!

We discussed which materials felt good beneath our feet and which ones we could do without.

How do you like to teach sorting? 

Any great ideas for sorting by flexibility? 

Sorting materials?

Throw 'em my way!

Gumball Madness

Let me start this post by asking you if you currently own a 1" circle punch.  If the answer is no, you can buy one HERE for $5.99. They are really clutch to have around the house.  I've used mine for nearly every craft project I make.

So now you can see how I cut out 40-ish gumballs per student so easily.  Report cards are coming up and I needed an easy way to get several math assessments.  We were highlighting the letter G this week, so I figured why not do gumball math all week long? My only concern was that the kids would get tired of it, but on the contrary, they actually looked forward to getting their bags of gumballs each day.

Here's how our week panned out:

Monday: Sort by color

Tuesday: AB & ABC Patterns

Wednesday: Count & Tally

Thursday: Graph

Friday: Glue the gumballs down to make a gumball machine! (This is actually done during language arts and not math.)

One thing to prep, a week's worth of activities, quick and easy assessment. Score! 

Kiddos just left their items in the bags all week and I collected them at the end of math.  After we worked with our gumballs, students broke up into partners for math stations and I was able to help students who required additional assistance on the whole-group activity.