Math Literacy in the Classroom

Marygrove College is having a linky party about incorporating Math Literacy in your classroom. I love reading aloud - seriously, it's my favorite thing to do in the classroom! Even during math I love to read aloud - and there are so many great books to read that incorpaorate math! In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there is not a single math concept that you can't find a book for. In this post I'll share some of my favorites for teaching kindergarten/first grade math concepts:

Ordinal Numbers:

Ten Rubber Ducks by Eric Carle is a great book for teaching ordinal numbers - the story is cute and the illustrations keep everyone interested! I've made these little rubber duck cards with the ordinal numbers on them, you can use them in a pocket chart and have the students order them, you can put a Velcro dot on the back and use on a felt board to retell the story, or you can hand them to students and have them line up in that order.  My kinders always love this book, and the many ways to learn ordinal numbers with it! Grab this sweet little freebie from my Google Drive by clicking the picture.

 Time:

I think everyone knows (or should!) that The Grouchy Ladybug is a great book for teaching time. The story is engaging and can also be used to teach about sharing. I usually get out my class set of clocks and have the students follow along as I read the book.

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar is perfect for learning the days of the week - and there are tons of resources out there to use with it! Check out First Schools' site for some printables. My favorite thing to do is make combine math and writing by having the children make their own book about "The Very Hungry Kindergartner". They illustrate each page and finish the sentence "On Monday, the very hungry kindergartner ate _________." Their favorite page is Saturday of course where they eat all the junk food!

This is an oldy but goody! If you've never heard the song you have to  see the video on YouTube:

One idea would be to have each child memorize the part of the poem for their birthday month. In first grade I had them copy the poem and illustrate it!

Counting/Patterns:

This is a great book for the beginning of the year, learning to count to 10 or make patterns. I always used it during my Johnny Appleseed theme. If you check out Making Learning Fun, they have a ton of free printables to use with it. I love their felt board retelling set!

Basically, you can adapt almost any children's book to fit into your math curriculum. Take some of your favorite books and read through them with an eye to the math you could teach with them. If your personal library is spotty, you can purchase math literacy sets from places like Lakeshore.

I also keep math books in my math center, so that my kinders could read at that center as well. We need to teach our students that reading is all encompassing, so there should be books in every center.

Make sure you head over to Marygrove's linky party to find some other ideas for using literature to teach math!