It's the holiday season, which means chances are we have house guests over to celebrate the holidays or we are a house guest. This post contains affiliate links.
This is an exciting time of year. Everything is magical this time of year for preschoolers. It can also be a crazy time of year, as children can be on sensory overload with all the excitement that this time of year brings.
During our House Guests topic (Week 3, Lesson 14) from Cozy Winter Senses, we talked about what being a host means and how we can be a good one when we have people over at our house. They shared ideas on what they can do to make their guests feel comfortable (most said they would offer their guest a special toy to play with), and what we can do when we are a house guest ourselves. We want to mind our manners and be respectful of someone else's space, just like we would want someone to respect our space. Students also shared where they spend Christmas, are they a host or a house guest?
Every month we have story problems that we solve. We practice basic addition and subtraction skills, counting with 1:1 correspondence, and work on our understanding of the relationship between numbers and quantities. These story problems come in our Experience Preschool curriculum box. This month our story problems went along with our House Guests topic. We always use manipulatives to help us solve our story problems and this month they got to decorate craft sticks, turning them into people.
There are four story problems to solve, each one getting a little harder with the last two problems being 'challenge' problems. This month we worked with a higher number, 12! We also worked on grouping, making three groups of four.
The grouping was a bit tricky, however they quickly caught on once I demonstrated what that looks like. I noticed when it came time to count all of the people after grouping they would count to four and then start over from one at the next group. We ended up combining the groups together after creating them so it was easier to see that we needed to count how many guests there were, total. Three groups of four people equal 12. There were 12 people that came to the party.
They had a lot of fun helping create the manipulatives for counting this time. I'm seeing my preschoolers become more confident in counting as we work through story problems, which is exciting to see!
