Valentines Day Mini Eraser Activities You'll Fall For!

Have you see the adorable mini erasers at Target right now? I love the unicorns and pizzas! I've been hard at work making some activities to match, which was a struggle since we just moved to Okinawa, Japan!

This is the view from the seawall in Okinawa - gorgeous!

My husband is in the Army, so we will be in Okinawa for the next three years! Don't worry though, I'll still be teaching - no idea where yet, but I know myself well enough to know I'll have to have my own classroom somehow! In the meantime, I'll be using my 4 year old Sullivan as my guinea pig for all my ideas lol!

Some of you have been asking about more kindness activities, so today I'm sharing my February Random Acts of Kindness Calendar! Lots of ideas for helping to teach kindness in this month of love! Download it for free by clicking the picture!

And here are the mini eraser activities - they're perfect for February, but really the unicorn and pizza could be used year round! I had so much fun with these - I think the part-part-whole activities and the CVC word builders are my favorites!

 Just click here to see the mini eraser activities!

Fall Math Activities - with 2 FREEBIES!

Are you a Target mini eraser fiend? I stalk that Dollar Spot every chance I can, hoping to snag some mini erases! My students LOVE them, so much so that they'll happily practice math skills all day long, just for the chance to work with the erasers!

When I saw the Halloween erasers this year, I just had to create some activities to go with them!

Find them here: Fall Mini Eraser Pack! 

 Ten frame mats and number cards for the jack o'lantern and black cat erasers!

 One mat for 0-10 and one for 0-20 so you can easily differentiate!

 Spiderweb cards from 0-10 for practicing 1-1 correspondence with the spider erasers!

 2 patterning mats for practicing AB, AABB, AAB and ABC patterns with the spider erasers!

 Need a fun pumpkin activity? Check out this Pumpkin Math FREEBIE!

And if you're working on graphing, you'll want to check out my Fall Graphing Pack:

 2 Count & Graph activities.

 4 Graphs with charts - slip them in a page protector or laminate for reuse!

 2 Roll & Graph activities - students LOVE getting to roll the dice and graph!

 4 Spin & Graph activities.

Tip: just use a pencil and paperclip to create a spinner!

2 Pictographs! Students color and cut out the pictures to glue on their graphs!

Want to grab a FREEBIE? Check out my Thanksgiving Dinner graph!

And finally, the winners of my Facebook contest for a Utopia 360 4D VR/AR Bundle were announced, but if you didn't win don't worry, you can still get these STEM toys at MyRetrak and use the promo code "Herding Kats" for a 20% off discount on your entire order!

Three ESSENTIALS For Math Center (FREEBIE)

Setting up Math Centers in Kindergarten

At my Fun-tastic Games & Activities for Building Early Math Skills session at SDE's I Teach K in Vegas I presented about some of my favorite Math Centers. Oriental Trading Co. was generous enough to sponsor some giveaways during the session for items that I use in my centers, so I wanted to give a shout out to them, they always have great, inexpensive materials for my centers! Today I'm sharing a little bit from that session, to give you some math center ideas for kindergarten that will help save you time and make your Math Centers more engaging this school year!

One of my biggest Aha! moments was when I realized that it was way easier to change the CONTENT of a Math Center rather than having to teach a whole new set of rules/procedures each time because I changed the activity. Today I'm sharing the 3 essentials for my math centers - I change up the themes frequently, and differentiate the skill level or content, but once I teach my students how to use these essentials, I'm set for the year! I can change the look of the games and my students' engagement is renewed, yet I'm not wasting time teaching how to use new materials!

#1 Dice

I love dice because they're so versatile, and you can get so many different kinds - dice with numbers, dice with dots, dice with shapes, dice with 6 sides all the way to 20! Once I teach my students the rules of using our dice (shake once, roll gently, keep dice on the table) we are good to go with whichever dice fit our game! One of the first games I introduce is Roll & Cover. I love this because depending on the mat and dice you use, students can be practicing one to one correspondence, number recognition, shapes recognition, addition or subtraction! When we introduce addition, students play with 2 dice, adding them together and finding the sum.

 Later in the year, my students play with 3 dice, adding them all together for sums up to 18!

When we introduce subtraction, the game play changes slightly so that they roll the dice and subtract the smaller number from the larger number and find the difference.

We also use our dice to play Ten Frame Fill-Up! In this game, each child rolls a dice an places that many tokens onto their ten frame, filling them from top to bottom, left to right.  The first one to fill up all 3 ten frames and reach 30 wins!  

For all of these games, we just use dice and tokens from Oriental Trading Company. They have these round, colorful stacking blocks that are perfect to use as tokens - they come in a ton of colors and with 400 to a pack, there's enough to even split a pack with a teacher friend!

 We also use Geometric Dice from Oriental Trading to play Roll & Cover with shapes, and even Roll & Graph!

#2 Dominoes

I also love using dominoes in the classroom - they're great for one to one correspondence, subitizing and more! They're inexpensive so I've even had some luck with asking parents to donate a set or two to the classroom (in case you need ideas for a Wishlist!). My students love my Domino Math pack too!

 Creating number bonds is easy with dominoes!

We also use dominoes when comparing numbers!

I use them to help students learn vertical addition as well!

#3 Playing Cards

Playing cards are a must-have for Math Centers because there are so many no-prep games you can play with them! Go Fish is an easy game for number recognition for example. (I get my playing cards donated by the local casino, so that's why there are holes punched in the cards.) You can have your students sort them, place them in numerical order, even create 2 or 3 digit numbers!

 

I love using playing cards for fact families. Just draw two cards and the students write the addition and subtraction equations to match! Using the cards means that if students get confused they can count the shapes on the card, so it supports my lower students. 

Comparing numbers is easy with cards as well - just remove the face cards!

With these 3 inexpensive items, you'll easily cover all your Math Skills throughout the year! Your students will also love getting to "play" with dice, dominoes and playing cards, so they'll remain motivated and engaged during centers - it's a win-win! All of the above games can be played easily with a whiteboard and dry erase marker, but if you'd like to grab my Math Bundles to make it easy on yourself, you can see them here: Math Centers for Dice and Playing Cards  and Domino Math!

Visit my store and grab this Roll & Cover Sampler pack for FREE - perfect to go with The Kissing Hand!

Math & Reading Centers for Halloween/Fall! (FREEBIE!)

Halloween Math & Reading Activities

I took a trip to Target recently, and got inspired by some of their Dollar Spot goodies! I've spent the last few days getting some fun centers ready for my kiddos:

I found these mini Halloween clothespins and knew they'd be perfect for my Halloween Counting Clip Cards!

The kids count the cookies on the card and then clip the clothespin on the correct number.

I place a sticker on the back of the card corresponding to the correct answer. This way my students can flip the card over and get instant feedback on whether they were correct or not!

I also have a Fall Counting Clip Card set that doesn't include Halloween images. 

 I couldn't find any mini clothespins for this set, so I spray painted some regular clothespins! Again, I placed some fun Fall stickers on the backs of the cards so that this activity is self-correcting for my students!

 Next I found these mini erasers! They're sold in sets of 60 for just $1 and make perfect math manipulatives! I put a couple of bags into a pencil box and use it as an early finisher activity - my students pattern with them, count them, sort them, make shapes with them - you name the math skill, you can do it with mini erasers!

 I also use them as tokens for my Roll And Cover games! 

 

 The students each pick a type of mini eraser as their token, and then roll the dice and cover the number they rolled. For my more advanced students, I have mats that use 2 dice or even 3 dice! 

I also prepped my new Scarecrow Alphabet Match-Up Cards! These are so easy to differentiate - some of my students work on matching upper to lowercase letters.

 While others work on matching letter to beginning sound picture.

Sometimes they even match all 3 at once!

I have a few students who need extra practice with rhyme recognition, so my Pumpkin Rhyming Match-Up Cards are making their debut in centers this month!

And here's your freebie - some cute number cards to go with the web coasters also from Target! 

I cut the rings off some spider rings so that I had some colorful spider counters and now my kiddos have another high-interest counting activity! Not only can they use the cards to add spiders to the webs, they can also put them in numerical order and I can use them to test for one-to-one correspondence! 

If you want to grab these cute spider number cards, just click the picture to download them for free from my Google Drive! 

Now that I have some fun Halloween/Fall centers done, I'm going to be focusing on my STEM Nursery Rhyme series, so if you're one of the patient souls waiting for the next one, know that they're in the pipeline!