Visualizing Math with the iPad & Grade K

Last week I began working with Kindergarten to visualize mathematics skills using the iPad. Forget the mess of clunky pieces, longs, and flats! Number Pieces App (click here for the App Store) (Also avaliable as a website here) is a great resource, especially for kindergarten learning to write and show numbers 1-10! Students practiced writing their numbers (with the fancy little rhymes of Mrs. Dyke) and then showed the number with pieces. We learned that we we got to 10, we could select our 10 little pieces and the use the together button to make 1 long! Talk about visualization of ones, tens, and hundreds! You can even take apart a long to show ten pieces! The kids were super engaged and were really grasping the concept by the end of our work time!

Writing and Showing 3

This week, we moved on to previewing the shapes concepts that students will begin working with in real world situations next week. We used the GeoBoard App (click here for the App Store) to show different shapes. We talked about the characteristics of rectangles and squares and their similarities and differences. Students were even able to verbalize the difference between a rectangle and a square! We learned that a square is still a square even when we rotate it (I used Google Slides to demonstrate rotating a shape) or make it bigger or smaller! As long as the shape has four sides and four corners, with all sides being the same length (great use of vocabulary word too!) then the shape is still a square! We also used different colors to show that rectangles have four sides with sides across from each other having the same length (again with that vocab!) We used the same color for all sides of a square because all sides are equal lengths!

Different colored sides for a rectangle 

Same color sides for a square 

Until Next Time...

Mrs. G