Math Bags and Writing Journals

This year I decided to change up my end-of-the-day routines to include math and writing on a regular basis. As with all the regular routines that I use in my classroom, I wanted these routines to be simple enough to be consistent, but also allow room for growth and individualization.

Math Bags

I found this idea for Math Bags on my favorite preschool blog, Teach Preschool, and wanted to try it out this as our weekly math routine. I love it because it is simple, very open-ended, and it allows the kids to be invested in the manipulatives we are using. So every Tuesday the students are bringing in up to 5 small, miscellaneous items from home that they are willing to donate to what we've been calling our "Math Collection."

First, everyone gets a chance to share what they brought, like a mini show-and-tell. This part of the process is a great chance for the kids to practice their oral language skills, and hopefully develop confidence with math vocabulary as the year progresses as well. Sometimes the kids will share stories with us about where they found the items, and sometimes they will just tell us what they brought. I always encourage them to count and tell us how many items there are, which allows me to observe their development of number sense and one-to-one correspondence.

How we interact with the items after the sharing time will vary throughout the year. Right now we are focusing on careful counting strategies, like lining the items up and touching them as we count.

This week we added sorting to the routine, and organized the items by color.

So far, I feel like it has been a successful routine and I'm excited to watch it grow and adapt as the students build their mathematical understanding. As our collection grows, I am also planning to include the items for different math activities in center choices time as well.

Writing Journals

The second routine that I've added to the end of the day is writing in our journals on Thursdays. Their writing journals are always available to them during center time, and many students use them on a regular basis for their own creative purposes. But I wanted to devote some additional time to writing about common learning topics together so that students could learn from each other and we could focus on specific writing skills where appropriate. 

Of course, writing in preschool is very developmental and can be as simple as making marks on the page. No matter the stage of writing development among my students, I emphasize the meaning behind whatever they are scribbling, drawing, or trying to write by asking them to tell me about their work. Then I model the writing process by recording what they tell me on the paper. 

This is also a great way for me to check in with the information they are processing and learning from our theme units. For example, today I prompted the students to write about sunflowers today since that has been our focus topic. It was interesting to hear the different aspects of sunflowers that each student focused on as they told me about their writing. Some told me about how the seeds come from the head of the flower, and some told me about the parts of the flower like the petals and the long, green stem, etc. 

 

As a teacher, I love using writing journals consistently because it is such a visual way to document growth over time. It's such a simple routine, and I'm glad that I've found a regular place for it in our weekly schedule.