I’ve continued to tinker with this one! I’ve been lucky to have been invited into a range of classes from kindergarten to grade four, all interested in building a counting collections routine.
Every class that I have been in has been very focused during the counting process. It’s wonderful: partners with their heads together, murmuring quietly and placing items in cups, egg cartons or ten frames. I call this the “counting bliss” phase.
Next comes the recording phase where the teacher is called for guidance. This is where things start to get busier, especially when some groups are done and ready to show you their work and others need guidance. And this is where you realize you should have thought about what they do once done! Let’s keep ’em engaged and busy, am I right?
Here are some suggestions:
- Read the room. This works really well at kindergarten and grade 1. Teacher Taylor Lepore at Porter Elementary encourages her students to not only find their number around the room, but also to draw where they found it. One of her K’s was having some difficulty drawing the book where she found the number 17, but could write a letter B for book. This turned the activity into a joint math, writing and observing lesson. Pretty impressive!
- Build using a number of blocks equal to the number counted. I have tested this idea out with good success in 3 kindergarten classrooms and am about to test it out in a grade 2/3 class. This particular group of 2/3’s loves to build and really needs to practice their counting. If they want more building materials, they need to count more collections and record their work! We figure that we can motivate them to do more recording this way. Plus in the end, we can get them to think about how many blocks all together. We’ll see how it goes.
- Put their number on a class clothesline. Soyoung Lee tried this with her grade 1 class. The students had to first count their collections, record how they counted and then write their number on a blank paper tent. The students needed to estimate where on the clothesline (between zero and 99) their paper tent should go. It actually was a really good challenge for them and was certainly valuable for thinking about the magnitude of their number.
- Imagine sharing the collection. This is a great step for grade 3 and 4. Karin Allison encouraged her students to imagine sharing between 2 people after estimating and counting their collections. The collection was there for them to actually share out if they wished, but many were ready to strategize without using the objects. This abstraction can be leveraged to teach certain long division strategies.
- Count in a different way. If you counted by 5’s the first time, can you count in other ways? It is a good question to explore, although I find that kids are keen to try a new collection and not simply recount the old collection in a different way.