A Simple Kindergarten Math Game

Whew! Two days into the school year and we are already getting into our routines! I've come to the conclusion that I must mentally block out the first few weeks of school..because every year I manage to teach the children the routines and rules, but come September I can NEVER remember how I did it the previous years.
But, either way we our on our way! Today we did our first whole group math lesson followed by two of our BUILD centers. I am still assessing the students' math skills, so I haven't started guided math yet. I am hoping to by next week!


I gave each child a cup with 5 small stones in it. Any small manipulative will work - I chose the stones because we have a bunch in our loose parts bucket. I gave the students a few minutes to explore their math tools. I always try and build this time into introducing a new manipulative. I find it cuts down on the redirection time during the lesson.
Since this was our first time using math tools as a whole group, we went over the expectations - namely, that when I said it was time to be listeners that the stones go back in the cup, their hands go on their body, and that they not touch the tools until they were given directions.
If they don't use the math tools properly, they get them taken away and have to use either their fingers or a paper and pencil for the activity. (Usually this only needs to happen once for the students to realize I mean business.)
So after I gave the students this exploration times, I told them we were going to do math magic. Their eyes grew wide and there was some clapping.

I told the students we were going to do math magic. They were going to take stones out of their cup and STILL have 5 stones! I wrote a number on the dry erase board and then turned it around and told the students to quietly take out the right number of stones..if they talked, the magic trick wouldn't work. ;) While the students were taking their stones out, I took time to look at the students' thought process - who was taking out all their stones first, who was watching what other students were doing first, etc. This gave me such great insight into their number skills without having to formally assess them! 

In the picture above, students had taken 1 stone out of their cups. I had them count the number of stones still in their cup and then we counted how many stones there were all together. My students were AMAZED that they still had 5 stones even after taking some out of the cup. We will be doing this lesson again tomorrow, only this time I will introduce the concept of part-part-whole and the addition symbol. I cannot wait to see their excitement at being "math magicians!"