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Back to School - Get Ready to Count the Days

19/8/2015

4 Comments

 
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Back to School is definitely here! One of the routines I like to start at the beginning of the year is 'Counting the Days of School'.

This is borrowed from the States, where many schools count each day they are in school, and then celebrate when they reach Day 100. That usually happens some time in February - and who doesn't need a reason to celebrate in cold, dark February?!

Along with providing some much needed cheer, however, this routine is wonderful for building number sense in our littlest learners. Last year, all of the classes in our infant department set up ‘100 Days of School’ displays, and we all counted how many days we’d been in school that year by adding a new dot into a 10 frame each morning. 

This routine is very simple and takes very little time, yet it gives children a very real sense of the size of different numbers, as well as reinforcing place value concepts. My Primary 1s (kindergarteners) did not have difficulties this year with figuring out the difference between 26 and 62 – using the ‘Counting the Days’ display gave them daily concrete experience with the reason why numbers in the 20s have 2 groups of 10, while numbers in the 60s have 6 groups of 10. And almost all of my P1s could easily read numbers beyond 100 at the end of the year (this is not something that could be said for my Primary 1s before I started this particular routine!).

This file includes a Title for your display, a page of 10 frames (just copy them to get the number  of frames that you need),and number cards for the decade numbers from 0-200. I use these cards to label each 10 frame once we fill it up. You can see this in the picture below to the left – this was my display last year. To the right, you'll see 3 images from the file you can download - as you can tell, I've given the display a bit of a face lift!

There are also some blank number cards (you can see these after the '90' below) – these are for writing the day’s number when you are NOT on the decade. For example, when you reach day 16, you would have the ‘10’ card next to the first 10 frame, then rub out ’15’ that you wrote on the blank card the day before, and change it to ‘16’. The card with ‘16’ written on it would then go next to the 10 frame that has 6 dots (in the picture, the last card says ‘177’ because that is how many dots total there are). There are number cards (counting by 10) in this pack going up to 200, as I found it was helpful to keep counting after we'd had our 100 day celebration.

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4 Comments
Amy Bender
18/8/2015 02:51:09 pm

Hope you had a great first day. Thinking of you. I am so impressed with your blog!

Reply
Carolyn link
19/8/2015 11:27:53 am

Thanks Amy - that is very kind! Hope your first day went well also...I have a lovely class, but I'll be glad when the first week is over and we can get into more of a structured routine, rather than all of the 'get to know you/establishing rules & routines/back to school' stuff. :-)

Reply
Carol
25/2/2017 12:43:58 pm

I teach Primary 1 and about a year ago I found and downloaded your counting the days in school resources. This is the first year that I have counted the days in school with my students every day and I am thrilled with the results! The children love counting the days and have developed a good understanding of place value. They are also good at knowing how many more days till we reach the next 10. We celebrated 100 days a couple of weeks ago (lots of fun!) and now they are enthusiastically counting beyond 100 and can explain what each digit in, say 106, means. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for your post and resources!

Reply
Carolyn
27/2/2017 08:16:26 pm

Thank you so much for letting me know this. The 'Counting the Days' routine is such an easy way to instil number sense in little ones...I'm glad you have found it helpful and successful. I found the same thing when I was in Primary 1.

It means a lot to hear that the blog and resources are helpful - so thanks again for taking the time to let me know. Much appreciated!

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    I have taught from P1-P5 (K-4th grade). You'll find a variety of resources and ideas appropriate for these year groups as you explore this blog. I'm glad you are here and I hope you find activities, ideas or resources that are useful in your own class. 

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