Numbers

Home

Chat

Blogs

Collection

Directory

Home : 2003 : October : 19

Numbers
By Victoria

My first graders are having a really hard time with this too. I've been using the Eric Carle book "Today is Monday" and having them put the days of the week in order.

Each child gets a sentence strip with either a day
of the week or the name of the food ("Today is Monday. Monday, String Beans. Tuesday, Spaghetti.")that goes with the day. We tape them up in order and I ask questions like "What is BEFORE spaghetti?" while making a sweeping gesture backwards on the board.
We also use manipulatives (counting cubes) and make little piles of numbers. I do word problems like, "Cinderella has two pumpkins.

Snow White has six apples. Who has more?" The children know every time I say a number they're supposed to make a pile of that number with cubes. Then they can look at the piles and see which one is bigger.

It is REALLY hard to get them to understand the meaning of the words though. Even though we do all this, they still sometimes have no idea or just shout anything! GAH.