This charming tale by Denise Fleming is the perfect book for any wintry day—and a fun way to introduce a lot of important mathematical ideas. As a little boy adds more and more trimmings to a snowman on each page, children can chant along and experience the growing pattern: “4 prickly pinecones, 3 striped scarves, 2 bright blue mittens, and a red cap with a gold snap. By the time they reach “10 salty peanuts,” the children are recognizing increases in quantity and the snowman is looking fabulous.
Beyond counting and growing patterns, there are many more math-related ideas and activities that can be drawn from the book. Building and decorating a real snowman outdoors provides opportunities for children to talk together about spatial relations, size, quantity, symmetry, and shape as they plan and problem solve. Indoors, children can create their own paper snowman collages with art materials such as ribbons, pom-poms, stickers, yarn, and so on. Children can dictate a story about their finished snowmen, using math language to describe the number, location, and attributes of all the trimmings they selected.
It can also be a great way to explore Number Sense and Counting. Please click the image for a larger view of an activity poster that was made.
A child selects a card with a given number of dots.
Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking. They are not teaching episodes or formal assessments.
Cindy Collado and her preschool class at Stock School were involved in a shoe project that incorporated many math concepts through a variety of activities over the course of two months. The class started by taking a good look at their shoes and then talking and thinking about what they saw. They soon discovered that there were all kinds of way to sort them depending on how they were going to put them into sets according to the attribute they zeroed in on: color, type of shoe, and even shoe size. The children realized that they could represent and compare the size of the sets within each sort by graphing them. One group of children decided to make a bar graph to show types of fasteners, while a second group got a very different result when they graphed the same collection by color.
The sorting quickly led to a related algebraic concept as the class created patterns with their shoes (pink, white, brown) and made a “pattern train.”
Ms. Collado confirms that this truly was an idea that works: “The whole project was amazing as the kids began to initiate patterns and describe shoes – all of a sudden math concepts became part of all of our daily language without us realizing it.”
A child estimates the number of cubes in a collection.
Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking. They are not teaching episodes or formal assessments.
A child describes examples (and non-examples) of common 2-D shapes.
Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking. They are not teaching episodes or formal assessments.
A child composes a 6-pointed star shape using pattern blocks in multiple ways.
Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking. They are not teaching episodes or formal assessments.