sentences

My kinders are gradually getting the hang of the idea that letters make up word and that words make up sentences. Then, I had to go and throw number sentences into the mix.

Today we began to move beyond basic addition stories to interpreting the stories into number sentences. We began our lesson by reading a basic sentence, "I have a little cat." Then we put some magnets up on the board to compare to the sentence. We talked about how our numbers were like words and the mathematical symbols were like punctuation. Granted, the symbols are a little out of place, but seeing as my kinders are super smart, they got a hang of it pretty quickly.

Once I put the magnets on the board, my students used their previous knowledge to compose a number story about what they saw. Four magnets plus five more magnets equals nine magnets. Then we transferred that information into number sentence form. This is where things got a little tricky. While their stories were good, the idea of symbols and punctuation being the same made them want to put all of the symbols at the end of the sentence.

This is where my sentence came into play. We put the number sentence directly under the language sentence. I rearranged the words according to how the students tried to write their initial number sentences. This resulted in our original sentence reading, "I a cat have little." We talked about whether or not this made sense. All of my kinders were laughing because we have been talking a lot about sentences that make sense. This sentence did not. We talked about how the number sentence needs to be written in the right order, just like a language sentence, otherwise it wouldn't make sense.

By the end of the lesson, number sentences were making more sense to most of my kinders, but it will take some more practice for sure. At the very least, the foundation has been laid, and I think that it was a pretty good one (if I do say so myself).