What We're Reading and Introducing Math Concepts - week of January 25th

We're reading two of my favorite books from childhood and an additional one we just discovered!

• Madeline - with which we are following Five in a Row curriculum for activity ideas.
  
• Blueberries for Sal - D really likes the illustrations and often spends time after we are done reading to look at them hiself. 
• In the Snow: Who's Been Here? - We had fun identifying the animals. Despite being unseasonable warm here, it is timely for the season, particularly coming on the heels of some trips outside to locate tracks in the snow and making bird feeders to hang on our deck. 
• The Umbrella.  By Jan Brett, author of Town Mouse Country Mouse, beautiful illustrations!

 We've been having fun with counting and grouping. For example, we counted out 12 pennies, then we created 2 lines of 6 pennies each; 4 lines of 3 pennies and saw that they also formed 4 lines of 3 pennies. No matter how many likes, or groups, we still had 12 pennies. Then we talked about "more" and "less" - that 5 is more than 4 but 5 is less than 6. D seemed pretty intrigued. We used the pennies to create groups with the numbers so that visually he could see that there were more pennies in the group of 6 verses 4, for example. We'll continue this for the week. The incentive is that he gets to keep the pennies at the end of each lesson and put them in his piggy bank!