ABC...easy as 123...

It's so much fun teaching Kinders to write their letters, isn't it? If you're lucky you've got one of those Zaner Bloser handwriting books that your school bought you and you can just teach them to your heart's content. We weren't so lucky at my school so we had to get creative and think of something easier and faster than using highlighters on lined paper. So, I created these handy dandy handwriting practice pages. My kinders love them! There is a line for the capital letter and a line for the lower case. They can trace and then write. Once they write the letter they have 6 pictures to look at. They find the 3 pictures that begin with the sound that the letter makes and they color them in. It's a simple activity that can give you some great information about their phonemic awareness ability. It could be a good formative assessment for letter formation and letter sound knowledge. You can grab it here at my TPT store! (click the picture below for the link to the item in my store)

           

Building Number Sense

The first couple of weeks in kindergarten we work on learning our numbers and building number sense. We use lots and lots of manipulatives to do this. We count everything, play counting games, count daily, do math journals to practice number writing, and just immerse ourselves in daily number practice. On Friday we had a "no break day" and we needed a fun way to get up and move while working on our math, so we turned our colored rug into a giant graph and did a team building activity to practice counting sets of numbers up to 5. I placed dry erase boards with numbers on them at the top of the rug and gave each table group their own box of manipulatives. The task was to work together to count out one set to match each number 1-5 and bring them to the rug to place in one of the squares under that number. Once the task was completed we had what looked like a giant graph of manipulatives that we could then count. 

Another fun activity to practice number sense was a domino sorting activity. I found these chip and dip trays at the Dollar Tree and placed colored dots for numbers 1-6 in each space. I then gave the students the box of dominoes and told them to count the dots and place the domino in the section that had the correct number. I didn't remove the dominoes higher than 6, I just told them to place them to the side. That was just additional counting practice for them. They really enjoyed this activity. Very little prep and lots of time of the floor. Perfect kindergarten learning activities!!