At McCornack, we are working at the school level to promote math fluency.  This is the ability for students to compute and reason mathematical facts.  In Kindergarten, a strong sense of place value, especially for numbers 11-19, are essential for a developing knowledge of base 10.  An excellent online resource for math games, called ABCYA, has many games promoting math and literacy skills.  The base ten fun game is a good place to start with place value.

This February, we are currently exploring shapes and their attributes.  Kindergarteners, by the end of the year, should be able to identify most shapes (up to as many sides as an octagon, and other shapes such as a half-circle, a crescent, a star and a heart).

Instruction includes having classroom exploratory time for students to use different manipulatives and materials to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes.  Different materials include play-doh, geoboards with rubber bands, and old-fashioned paper and pencil.  The following art project by one of our students explored layering half circles onto one another to make leaves in a tree:

After exploratory time, we gather to discuss what makes a shape a shape.  We create anchor charts together to share knowledge and to make content more accessible to all students: