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Thank you to Janice Novakowski for sharing a math lesson she created using the book “Collections”. You can follow Janice @janicenovakowski on Instagram where you will find images and ideas from her fabulous work with teachers and students exploring math, Reggio, literacy and more!
| Janice Novakowski |
Counting Collections
After reading the Foxy and Friends book, Collections, and discussing different ways we could count collections, I invited the grade one students to learn with a partner to count a collection. The classroom teacher has a set of counting collections accessible to students in small baskets.
As students negotiated the choice of collections and how they would count them, they were also invited to use Foxy and Friends stick puppets to count along with them. As the students counted the collections in different ways (by 1s, 2s, 5s, taking turns, lining the objects up to count, placing objects in a container as they count, etc), they were also encouraged to play with recording their counts in ways that made sense to them on mini-whiteboards, so that they could share their counts when we came together again at the end of the lesson.
After about 20 minutes of counting together, I invited the children to come back to the carpet to share what they counted and how they counted it. We closed our time together by choosing a collection, a basket of acorns and using the children’s suggestions for how to organize the collection and then how to count it. I modelled ways to record each count on the whiteboard.
The classroom teacher noted increased focus by some students when using the stick puppets and I appreciated how in using them, we could really notice which students demonstrated one-to-one correspondence when counting.
Janice Novakowski (she/her/hers)
Teacher Consultant (K-12 Mathematics and Numeracy)
Thank you to Teresa Hadley from @joys.of.learning for sharing how she used the book “Collections” with her children.
https://www.instagram.com/stories/joys.of.learning/3472425366931710214
Teresa writes: Do your learners like to collect things? Our kinders couldn’t wait to tell us all about their collections at home – rocks, shells, monster trucks and yes, plenty of dinosaurs! When we asked what they love to do with them, they told us they count, sort, and play with them. So, we decided to bring that same energy to our outdoor learning area.
After reading Foxy and Friends: Collections by Lynda Henney, we set out to see what treasures we could collect outdoors. It wasn’t long before we had a variety of leaves, sticks, and other nature goodies! The best part? Watching our learners practice math without even realizing it! They sorted by size, lined things up from smallest to largest (and vice versa), and, of course, counted everything. They quickly realized that the pile of pine needles was going to be very difficult to count 😂 so they decided to count how many big handfuls they collected instead.
What would your learners collect outside? How do they like to organize or play with their treasures?
