What I Learned in Kindergarten...

When our kinders started school on August 27th, the pre-school kiddos did not. At our school for the first two weeks, us pre-school teachers and paras are assigned to a kindergarten classroom. Every kinder room will have at least 2 adults for those first two weeks. All support staff also helps with buses the first week, breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, and recess duty. Shew. Even though we don't have our own students, we sure stay busy.

I know it's a huge help to the kinder teachers, especially that first week. I even have some fun seeing all of the things they do in kindergarten and I love seeing how each teacher handles the first day of school differently. 

One of the things I noticed this year was that during math the teacher I was working with jumped right into tens frames. It made me think how easily I could begin to expose my pre-schoolers to the visual structure for counting. I create a lot of counting activities and add boxes for one to one correspondence, so why not create something with tens frames.

Hello Playdoh. I thought making playdoh balls could be great practice for counting with tens frames. If you don't want to use playdoh you could easily use pom-poms and even attach Velcro to stop them from rolling around!

When do you introduce tens frames to your kiddos? Will this freebie be helpful for you? 

{click here to download}