Counting Counts!!!

The title of Year 1 Unit 6 Mathematics assessment for this week. Sounds catchy, and exciting... 

The first 3 weeks of Unit 6 in the Australian Curriculum has seen Year 1 focusing on Number Sense. And after 3 straight weeks most, if not all of my class has a very solid understanding of counting, skip counting by 1's, 2's, 5's, 10's to 100 and place value (imagine here my leap of joy at such success!!!) 

The Curriculum so far this year hasn't delved into one area in such depth, usually only allotting 3 or so days to a topic. This Unit has been far the best learning experience for the kids...

The assessment piece was a fun, hands on activity conducted during weekly maths rotates - how easy was this to be??? 

The Australian Curriculum provides everything needed for the assessment piece from the hands-on pieces ...

... which I changed to make larger, child-usable and laminated...

... to the 'cheat-sheet' of prearranged questions to ask each student...

And the kids loved doing the tasks, 4 in all, and didn't realise they were being assessed...

So, another assessment ticked off for this term in Mathematics! Next week (Week 8) has my class moving onto 3 lessons of time (o'clock and half-past) followed by 2 lessons on capacity. 

Off now to hunt out some suitable resources (read: prowl blogs, Pinterest and TpT!!!)

Messy Maths Boxes...

What a fun week I have coming up in maths! Following the C2C Australian Curriculum for Year 1 (Unit 5), this coming week has its focus on Length, or more exactly, comparing lengths with informal units. Don't you just love working with kids using informal units??? They always have a ball, and don't realise they are learning. 

Informal length chart

The first thing I am 'required' to do is put together a Messy Maths Box. C2C gives the following outline...

Find and prepare

Messy Maths Box (two or three large tubs to share  between groups) containing a range of the following:

straws, counters of different types, 3D shapes, 1 cm cubes, match sticks, cotton reels, paddle pop sticks, MAB blocks, 2 cm cubes, milk bottle tops, bread tags, 

dice, Cuisenaire rods, linking cubes, plastic coins, 

lengths of string or wool, lengths of paper tape

So from this...

Messy Maths equipment

To this...

One empty Messy Box

To this...

Organisation is the key to all classroom lessons, expecially those involving the word 'mess'.

I have also sourced a few brilliant activities for maths rotations this week, inkeeping with the theme. Thursday is a 1:1 assessment lesson on the topic, so several independent activities are needed.

Maria at Kinder-Craze has a super little Hands-On Measurement Freebie -

Jessica at TpT has a fun bat measurement activity -

Jessi at Fantastic, Fabulous, Firsties! has a Monster Measurement Mansion Game to help reinforce non-standard measurement.

And my last piece of informal measuring for the week is an idea that I saw(???) where you tape the units together so the groups actually have a tape measure made out of paperclips, paddlepop sticks, breadtags etc. This helps to reinforce the idea of butting the measuring pieces up for accuracy.

So it looks like I am all set for the week in maths. Is there anyone else out there following C2C for Year 1, or who uses a Maths Messy Box??? Also, jump in with any other measurement activities that you use...