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Welcome to week 1 of our Math Through Play Book Study!  I love seeing my students excited about learning math and engaged in doing mathematics.  I love seeing how young children work on big math ideas through play and am so excited to be reading this book.  After being just a few chapters into this book, I already have a few ideas for how I can incorporate more math into my own children's play as well as set things up at school to have more math play time.   Here is the posting schedule for this book study: Sunday March 29th: Chapters 1-3 Sunday April 5th: Chapters 4&5 Sunday April 12th: Chapters 6&7 Sunday April 19th: Chapters 8&9 If you are just joining us, head to this post for more details!  Chapter 1: Play and Problem Solving Kids need to play.  Some of my favorite activities in the classroom where I really feel like kids are engaged and learning math while solving problems have came from play based situations.  It is truly amazing ho...

Every once in a while I will stumble upon a math literature book that my students and I can not get enough of.  Today I want to tell you about one of our new favorite books,   Zero, Zilch, Nada Counting to None This book is about a young rabbit who gets a job in a balloon factory.  He is asked to blow up 100 balloons for a party.  He has a set of 10 racks with 10 slots in each rack to put the balloons in.  He blows up all 100 balloons and then tries counting to make sure there really are 100.  He gets ideas from other animals that are stopping by to drop things off.  He counts by 10's, 5's, 2's, and 1's.  The only problem is that he can't seem to keep track of which ones have already been counted.  He decides that the solution to this problem will be to pop each balloon as it as counted.  This leads to a hilarious conclusion and a great opportunity to talk with your students about how to organize and keep track when counting objects. ...

Welcome to this week's edition of Monday Math Literature!  I have been having so much fun the last few weeks playing with the recipes and math ideas in this great book.   Eat Your Math Homework This book includes 7 different recipes that kids and adults can make together.  There are ideas for incorporating math before, during and after cooking.  As part of my quest to get kids playing more  I have found a lot of great ideas in this book. The lesson I want to share with you is called Milk and Tangram Cookies.  It was done with a few upper elementary students who are a bit behind and then some younger students joined us at the end.  Check it out! These students have had some experience with fractions.  I was concerned about some of their conceptual understanding of fractions and wanted to take this opportunity to review a few big ideas.  Many of the ingredients in the recipe called for half a cup.  I decided to only put out the quarter and...

The countdown to spring is on!  This is the time of year that I can't wait to get outside and dig in the dirt.  I also like to re-commit myself to professional reading because it motivates me to be my best as the school year comes to a close.  I have not done much professional reading since finishing up the Number Talks books study and I can't wait to dig into a few more good books.  With the emphasis this time of year on standardized testing, I wanted to pick something to keep teachers minds off of testing.  I have done some exploring with math play  and am interested in reading more about play based learning.  So I have decided for my next book study, I will be digging into Mathematics Through Play in the Early Years .   Each Sunday, I will be posting my thoughts about a few of the chapters and I would love to have you join me.  You can participate by leaving a comment here or writing your own blog post and linking it in the comments secti...