Math Tool Kits

I was fortunate to be able to attend the SDE I Teach K conference in Las Vegas last week and learned so much that I just had to get started as soon as I got home! Did anyone else feel that way? It really motivated me! The first thing I wanted to get started on was the Math Tool Kits that Dee Dee Wills over at Mrs. Wills Kindergarten taught me. I took 2 of her classes and now I have a laundry list of things I want to complete based on all I learned from her.

Here is how I did mine:

First I took a trip to my local Walmart and purchased 3 ring binders. They were on sale for .97 cents each. I bought 13 of them so that my 26 kinders could share them. I plan to make my kids math partners, which will be a perfect change for how I usually do things. What worked last year was that I introduced lessons from the carpet while the kids sat in what we called our "Math Circle". Since I had a (wonderful) student teacher last year, one of us would be teaching while the other would be passing out our tools to use when the lesson was over and independent practice began. This year I will not have that luxury because that student teacher will now be running her own classroom. When I heard this idea from Dee Dee, I thought YES!! That is what I need!

I made a list of things I wanted to include in my tool kits. Most things I made myself and some I got from here and here.

I still have to add the manipulatives like dice and counters, etc. that are in my classroom but for now, I prep what I can from home. The pouches are 97 cents at walmart right now. I am hoping they keep, we'll see!

 

The outside cover I got from the Dee Dee Wills download. I had to tape mine on since the .97 cent binders do not have the extra outside clear pocket. Boo! But yay! for cheap!

Our first unit at my school is sorting, so I included lots of different sorting mats that sort several items, 2 items and 3 items. In my pencil pouches, I plan to include things to sort by color, shape, size and attribute. I included a graph too so the students can add in that skill a little later on. I learned a lot about teaching graphing from Kim Adsit that I will share in a later post.
My large sheets are in sheet protectors and my half sheets are laminated. I plan to also include a white board marker in their pencil pouches so they can write on all of these mats.


I included a 100 chart, addition, subtraction frames and mat for making 10.

I included 2 ten frames. We will start by just using the top and then moving on to using both as our numbers become bigger than 10.




These are quite a bit of work, but I think they will be well worth it in the end. If you would like a copy of the mats I made, just email me Aphisrose@yahoo.com and I would be happy to share them with you :)

Do you do math tool kits like Dee Dee's? What do you include that I haven't thought of? I would love to hear your ideas!