During February, Number Corner part of our focus has been on teen numbers.  Children have learned to think of teen numbers as 10 ones and some additional ones.  To reinforce this concept we have been playing a game called capture the teen number.  The class is split into two teams, orange and blue.  Team members take turns flipping a  teen card and covering the corresponding number on the number line with a sticky note that matches their team's color.  The cards we use are double ten frame cards, with the first 10 dots shown in black and the rest of the dots in red.  We have worked on strategies for quickly identifying the quantity without counting all of the dots.  Some examples are  touching the black dots and saying 10 and then counting on for the red dots (10...11, 12, 13) and looking for familiar number combinations such as doubles.  Many children are now able to immediately recognize how many red dots are showing and can name the teen number.  When children identify the number instantly I ask them to share how they know so quickly.  Some of their explanations include ideas like "I saw 3 dots on top and 2 on the bottom and I know 3 and 2 is 5," "I saw 4 dots like on a dice and one more and I know 5 is one more than 4," and "There are 2 empty spaces and I thought one empty space would mean 9, so 2 empty spaces is 8."

A different game had children working with partners to show teen numbers, with one person showing 10 and the other person showing more fingers to make the corresponding teen number.  Learning to compose and decompose teen numbers into 10 ones and some more ones lays the foundation for understanding place value and the base ten system.

On Thursday we had a very special visitor in kindergarten:  Fred the therapy dog!

Fred is 4 years old and weighs 210 pounds.  He eats three times a day and loves other dogs and cats.  Children will have an opportunity to read to Fred when he visits our school on Thursdays.  Thanks to Katie Babic for making this happen.

Finally, after rescheduling four times because of all kinds of weather, Carrie was able to come to school this week for an ECO session focused on animals in winter and tracking. We began the morning with an interactive story about different animal gaits and the track patterns created by each of these:  hoppers, walkers, bounders and waddlers.  Children then had an opportunity to try each gait, following tracks laid out on yoga mats.  This is harder than it sounds!  Ask your child which gait was most challenging.  After snack we headed outside to look for tracks.  Unfortunately because of all of the new, deep snow we saw very few tracks, except a dog or two down on the path.  However, we had lots of fun playing in the fresh snow down in the field creating a network of connected homes.

On Wednesday we celebrated our 100th day of school with several activities focused on 100.   During math, students searched the room for ten small pictures of sets of objects in groups of 10 to 100, recording the number of each set of objects once they found the pictures.  They also played a board game that involved moving a game piece to 100 and made strings of 100 beads organized by color in groups of 10.  Later in the day they worked in small groups to build with 100 geo-blocks, 100 keva blocks, 100 pattern blocks, and 100 paper cups.   Throughout the day, children searched for 100 numbered tiles hidden around the room and matched them with their corresponding number on a 100's chart.  Several students also decided to write numbers up to 100.  It is always exciting to mark this milestone in the school year.

With the sudden thaw and accompanying rapid snow melt I asked children to please try to stay dry at recess on Wednesday.  Alas, the water is too enticing and it wasn't long before a group of children was "ice fishing" in the river that is usually our playground path.  Pretty soon others joined and decided sleds would make pretty nice fishing vessels.  Chunks of ice soon became fish (or in one case a shark) and while nobody stayed completely dry, they had a great time at recess and brought in quite a catch!  Hopefully it will snow again soon.