Daily Math Routine

 I'm trying to strengthen my daily math activities.  I have always had a "healthy" serving of math during our morning calendar time.  We count the days in the month, recite the days of the week, count the days we've been in school (both with a 100s chart and a hundreds, tens, and ones pocket chart), and graphed the daily weather.







This year, I added a daily attendance count.  Currently, we're waiting until our math time after lunch to daily take attendance.  This attendance isn't what is turned into the office- this is really just a head count routine for my class.  We take the stick of unifix cubes and pass the stick of 20 all the way around our circle.  We count as each student takes a cube off.  Then, to double check our math, we count as we rebuild the attendance stick.  We make sure to make note of the students who are missing (none so far- perfect attendance-WOOT WOOT).

I'm considering adding another routine to our math time.  My mother gave me this really big container that used to hold pretzels.  It's huge- really!  To give you an idea of scale, there are about 10 baby food cups stacked together inside of the jar.  I'm going to make a label, slap it on that container and call it our "Counting Jar."  Each day, we can count something different.  I'm seeing this as more than just for counting though- think about how my kiddos can reach deeper into their minds to think about capacity!