Teaching Munchkins: "Pumpkin Palooza!"

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

"Pumpkin Palooza!"

My thoughts and prayers go out to all those who have been directly affected by Hurricane Sandy. Here in Buffalo, we are feeling some effects, like rain and high winds. School closed today because of flooding and power outage concerns.

So that gives me time to post a few things that my little munchkin and I have been doing.

We have been having lots of fun with our own little “Pumpkin Palooza”!

“Pumpkin Palooza” started last weekend, when we took a trip to the Great Pumpkin Farm! It turned out to be a perfect Pumpkin Picking Day!

It was tons of fun and we ended coming home with quite a few pumpkins, in many different "small" sizes:
Anyhow, on another note, I have been researching and learning about Five and Ten Frames and have been trying to find a way to introduce it with my little one and eventually, in my classroom.

To make things simple, I decided to begin with smaller concept of Five Frame.

I created these Pumpkin Five Frame mats (and found the candy corn mats on TpT) to introduce my little munchkin to the concept. Of course I had to make it fun and used candy corn and candy pumpkins!

I started by just having her counting candy pumpkins on each mat , then moved along to simple adding problems, such as “If you have 2 pumpkins and I gave you 3 more, how many would you have?” So we started with the math strip with 2 dots and I had her add 3 more pumpkins onto it and count the total.

Then we moved on to Candy Corn Ten Frame. I found these mats in a Candy Corn Math unit (freebie), at Oceans of First Grade Fun. It’s geared towards 1^st grade, but very adaptable for lower grades too. Make sure to stop by and pick up a free copy and have some fun counting candy corn!

The part she liked the best was when she was able to fill up the mats and then was able to eat them all up! (Well, not ALL of them!)