Math at Rashi is about more than finding the answer to a problem—it’s about making math fun, useful, and connected to the real world. This month Kindergartners are learning to identify different attributes and recognize and follow patterns. With the guidance of their teachers, including Lower School Math Specialist Fallon Katz, students first practiced these skills by sorting buttons and pattern blocks. The entire class was soon skillfully sorting objects according to various different features, and creating, extending and copying patterns presented to them. This work supports students’ ability to generalize, predict, and record information in a variety of ways.
Once the basics of the unit were mastered, Kindergartners moved on to challenging games such as “What’s the Same? What’s Different?” to compare items of the same or different color, size, and shape. They also played “What’s my Sorting Rule?”, in which students looked at a collection of objects arranged by a partner and had to guess the sorting method. The children then practiced their computational skills by writing number sentences to match their sort. Finally, they played the game “Trading Shapes”, where they recreated triangles, rhombuses, and hexagons with pattern blocks by observing their attributes and shape.
Now students are extending their knowledge to the number line. They are working on finding and completing patterns along the number path, and learning how to skip count by “jumping” along. They also practice more complicated patterns that go by 2’s, 3’s, 5’s and 10’s. And then there’s “Guess my Number”—where one player thinks of a number, while the other child asks yes or no questions to figure out which it is.
These exercises and games cultivate our Kindergartners’ mathematical thinking, allowing them to see math everywhere and understand how it can be used to solve real-world problems.