Have you ever had teaching supplies that you always have on hand and can't live without? Well these five math materials are on my must-have list for teaching kindergarten Math! Here's how I use them in my own classroom.
There are so many uses for these colorful dice! In my Kindergarten classroom at the beginning of the year, we use these dice to play “Roll and Write”. Students roll a number and then write it on paper. Later in the year, we will roll two dice and add the numbers together to help us learn addition. My students love the different colors of the dice and that makes them magically engaging!
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I always keep several decks of playing cards in my classroom so that we can play different math games. One of our favorites is a variation on “War” that we call “Peace”. Students each flip over one card and decide which card is either the smallest or biggest (depending upon which skill we are working on). The student with either the biggest or smallest card gets to keep all the cards played in that hand. We also love playing “Go Fish” to help us recognize different numbers and number quantities.
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We love using dominoes to help us match number quantities! We label some small buckets or containers with numbers. Students count the number of dots on the dominoes and place them into the container with the total sum of the dots. Later in the year, we teach the students how to play a simple version of dominoes so that they can practice matching up the ends that have the same amount of dots.
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The Dry Erase Number Line Sheets are the perfect solution to helping students understand the idea of addition and subtraction. When we introduce either of these concepts, we hand students a number line and a dry erase marker and have them mark and “x” on the beginning number and make “hops” either forward or backward to help students understand adding and subtracting numbers.
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Just the novelty of these super fun dice is enough to draw my students into wanting to play any math game that involves using them! We love playing addition (and sometimes subtraction) games with the dice in dice. When my students roll the dice, they first write down the number that’s on the die on the inside of the larger dice and then add the number on the larger outside die. They add those two numbers together to get the sum. With some of my higher students, we practice subtraction. They tell me the answer they get when they take the smallest number rolled on the die away from the largest number rolled on the die. We write all of this work down so students can see what math sentences/equations look like.
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