by Debbie Cook
25. September 2009 12:06
The Deers have been looking at Problem solving, reasoning and numeracy this week. The three activities we have done are, counting the children, finding shapes, and adding and subtracting.
We done the counting activity so the children could recite some number names in sequence, we did this at register time when the children were sat on the carpet. This is an activity that we do daily, but it was really intresting to step back and observe the children doing it for themselves especially the children that are new to Deers and learning what we do. I started the activity by telling the children how many children we had in that day so they knew what they were counting to, we then used our special fingers to point at the children and count in rote, which all the children paerticipated in, with the older children copying the names of the numbers as they were said by the practitioner. I would suggest doing the activity again but this time encoutraging everyone to participate which would mean practitioners supporting the younger children more.
Next we did finding shapes to show an awareness of similarities between shapes within the environment. To do this we cut out some simple shapes and the children had a turn at trying to name the shapes. A ll the children listened at this point and even the younger children had a try at repeating the shapes names. Then the children had to find objects within the room that were the same shape as the ones we had been naming, only two children took part in this part of the activity, this is probably because this was slightly too challenging for some of the children to do.
The third activity was adding and subtracting, this was done through adding objects to a group of objects and then subtracting them to help the children gain the concept of addition and subtraction. To do this we used coloured sorting bears, we had three bears first and the children counted these, next i added one and asked the children to count them again and asked if the number in the group had cahnged, one child had seen and understood that there were now more in the group. Next i took two away and asked the children to count them, now more children understood that there were fewer bears in the group.
This week we also went on a walk to Palmer park to return our libary books and choose some new ones.
Have a good weekend.
Dancing Deers
