Monday Math Literature Volume 47

If you missed last week's Monday Math Literature about a few fun tangram books and a great free app for tangrams, you can check it out here!

Today I want to share with you a really fun book that is great to use as math literature and also makes a great mentor text for writing workshop.

Fat Frogs On a Skinny Log

I recently used this book with a group of pre-K students who will be starting Kindergarten in the fall.  My goal was simple but important for kids this age.  I wanted to work on number recognition, one to one correspondence and writing the numbers to 10.  I also was going to be making a little frog craft and wanted to tie everything into the frog theme.  

The great part about this book is that it can be used with older students as well as a mentor text for writing time.  As the number of frogs on the log increases, so does the number of adjectives used to describe the log.  This is a great text to use when working on improving adjectives in students' writing.  

After listening to the story, we went back through the pages in random order and worked on identifying numbers.  As you can see in the picture above, there is a nice numeral in the top left corner of each page.  Some kids could identify the numeral right away while others needed to count the frogs.  This was great formative assessment for me to see who already recognizes numbers to 10.

Then I had kids trace numbers to 10 on this little half sheet of paper.  

You can grab this little printable for free on Google drive

Then we made some sweet little frogs and when they were dry we used them to practice counting and do some simple addition and subtraction story problems as a group.  If you are working with slightly older students, I have several other frog themed freebies that I use with kids in Kindergarten and first grade.  

These cute little frogs doubled as father's day gifts!

These frogs are simple enough for very small kids and look cute even if they are not that crafty!  All you need is some rocks, paint, wiggle eyes and green craft foam!  We used the yard and garden variety of paint that is specifically made for painting rocks and does not wash out once dry.  These frogs were meant to double as father's day gifts and many kids wanted them to be left out in the garden.  The paint washed right off when it was still wet but shouldn't once dry. 

Get more ideas for great books for your classroom at Mrs. Jump's Class