Hopping from K to 2!: Math Games and Ideas

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Math Games and Ideas

Number sense is such an important concept for young kids to understand. In kindergarten, it’s all about numbers- what they are and how we use them in the world around us. Kids in K-2 learn about counting, grouping, and comparing quantities of numbers using more and less and begin to skip count by 2’s, 5’s, and 10's.
Here's a center to help students practice skip counting:

The children also worked on their own skip counting book to practice counting by 2's, 3's, 4's, 5's,&10's using pictures to help those who needed more support.

In second grade, place value becomes more important and students need to have a solid understanding of number sense. My kids need to readily break numbers down into hundreds, tens, and ones so they add them together when solving problems. This is always a tough concept for them.

To supplement our math program in these areas, I created Buggy Math so students can practice these concepts in a fun and engaging way.
We started this week and the kids love the dice games. I love them because they don’t require a lot of prep time and once the students learn the games, they play them after they’ve completed their work.

It includes anchor charts, printables, and no-prep games to teach and reinforce the concept of place value, even and odd numbers, greater than/less than, 10 more/10 less and 1 more/1 less. There is one game that requires cards to be cut up, but that's it!

There's not enough to say about the invention of foam dice... it makes dice games so much quieter.

If you don't have foam dice... I used to have my kids roll the dice on foam sheets from AC Moore or Micheals.

Last week, we used our tens and ones mats with unifix cubes to reinforce the concept of place value. Then, we played a few games. Each game comes with directions that you can put out in a center. Here's the game called Roll A Number. Students roll a number with a partner and circle the larger number.