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Curriculum. It's kind of a bummer. Or at least when you are told to use certain materials to meet the curriculum and standards.

This afternoon I met with my fellow kinder teachers and we talked math. We started the year following the new materials that the district purchased, and now that we are almost a quarter of the way through the year things are starting to crumble. We were chasing the curriculum as opposed to nurturing our students.

In the first eight weeks of school we have pushed through numbers zero to ten. We have worked on group and number comparisons. We have worked on the concept of one more. We have worked on ordinal numbers. But what, we were wondering, do our students actually know? When we boil it down, not much. We keep on pushing and pushing, instead of building. After we wrap up chapter two next week, we're getting down and dirty. We will still use the resources that the district purchased, but we will shuffle through the chapters to find what fits the students needs. We will build on basic skills so that our kinders have a solid foundation when they move on to first grade.

The starting point: number sense. We are going to dig deep and make sure that our students understand the story of each number. We want them to know that three plus two equals five and that two plus three equals five. We want them to cut and paste and make art to demonstrate these skills. We want math to become more hands on, to be paced to fit their five and six year old minds, and we want them to feel successful.

Granted, I have a super bright bunch this year so things have been going pretty well. But when we saw that the next chapter is counting and recognizing numbers to one hundred, a red flag went up. Our students need a stronger base before we push to that level. We will compose and decompose numbers and then move on to adding and subtracting them. This may seem like a bigger push than counting to one hundred, but these are skills that are integrated and build upon one another. Our students will know (hopefully) why they are doing different things and build a conceptual understanding of numbers. We may be thinking big, but we have big dreams for our little learners.