About a month ago a friend of mine pinned the following link on my Pintrest board:
http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2010/05/prek-numbers-shapes-colors-review.html I fell in love with it, and the blog, and thought these would be excellent, easy activities to reinforce our numbers. Wedendsday and Thursday our are Numbers days, so it was the perfect time to try our first Numbers Worksheet.
Thinking this was going to be a very easy activity for the Professors, I set it up at the kitchen table as a morning Ice Breaker.
At first, everyone sat down and got right into the activity.
Either Professor #1 or #2's sheet, I can't remember.
Professor #3's Worksheet. He gave it a good go! : )
But then....things got interesting.
Professor #3 started getting bored....
Professor #2 started counting in a timeline to 10, instead of inside the boxes. When he got to the bottom of the page he declared he was done.
Professor #1 started counting out the number of boxes, till he reached 10.
At which point, I intervened and got him back on track.
Professor #3 started copying his older brother.
But then just started making a mess.
So we made a quick sensory bin.
Professor #2 just could not grasp the concept of counting out the amount of pom poms to the amount of boxes, and continued in a number line format.
He eventually completed his work, but did not get the concept at all, even after I worked with him on it. We tried several different approaches, one of which was touching and counting each pom pom out loud then saying and tracing the completed number on the left with our counter finger.
He decided to join Professor #3 in the sensory bin.
Professor #1 started having a catastrophic meltdown because his pom poms were drifting all over the paper.
With my help, he finished, but the activity completley ruined his flow for the morning, and he didn't have the best circle time. Insha' Allah, I'm hoping some fresh, Fall air this afternoon will have him feeling a little better.
The thing I learned from this activity, is that, while numbers 1-5 were easy, the second work sheet was way to overwhelming for them. We need to work alot more on relating number symbols to number concepts, a common problem. We also need to do it one row at a time, not an entire worksheet. I plan to do this as full circle time lesson next week, insha' Allah. In our circle time today we used our Arabic numbers book to count out objects, but did it in English. Interestingly, they have been counting things using their counter finger all day, so the seed has been planted, Alhumdullilah, we just need alot more practice.
