Counting Collections in Kindergarten and a FREEBIE!

It's that time of the year.  Here we are with 100 days of school behind us and we can REALLY count!  I jumped on this lesson earlier in the year and to tell you the truth the stars just did not align for us.  It was a mess, I wasn't ready, and they were not ready.  With a little patience and some extra planning it went PERFECT this time around!  Here are the highlights! 

Easy prep!  I grabbed 50-100 small items from around the room and put them in my trusty zipper pouches that I use to hold cards in our word work centers.   I made them all different...only a few actually had 100....we treated it like a scavenger hunt!   The zippers help us keep all the items together and the clear pouches let them preview what collection they would like to count. 

I used clear bingo chips, beans, glass gems, unit counters, beads, craft sticks, pennies, and mini erasers.

I also made sure that I had our egg cartons available from our Guiding Kinders lessons from Deanna Jump and Deedee Wills.  They are our go to counting tool right now so I made sure they were out in case the kiddos wanted to use them.  I also made copies of a counting collection page so they could keep track.  That's all the prep it took to get this FULL DAY of math ready!  Yes, in a half day of Kindergarten this took us all day!  

I introduced counting collections all together on the rug.  (I actually started by showing them a video on 100 from Brainpop Jr.) 

Then I posed the question,  

"How can we keep track when we count?"

We came up with some strategies together.  They mentioned counting by 2's, 5's, or 10's to make it easier and a lot of them said we should line them up and count and point.  Hooray for strategies!  
We agreed that for today we would start out counting by 10's and I showed them the counting mat.  After that I paired them up and sent them on their way. 

Filling the 10 frame to make 10.  Great counting practice!

Making piles so we can count by 10 to see how many.

All the different materials added to the excitement!

Once they counted their collection their next step was to record.  I'm not going to lie...this is the hardest part!  I really laid out the expectations here and showed them what they needed to have to be successful.  Their motivation to finish was the promise of getting to pick a new collection to count.  That's all they needed to get to work! 

Look at all of the different strategies for recording!

Some of the students needed to go back and do a little more work before they could really tell me that they knew exactly how many items were in their zipper pouch.  A few partners couldn't agree so they had to go back and recount.  Even if that happened there were so many great math conversations going on.

Our anchor chart we made at the end of the lesson.

 This lesson was part of our 100 days celebration.  We kind of celebrated all week (all month?) because we had so many fun things to explore.  I put them all together here in an Easy Prep Centers unit and you can see it HERE in my store or click on the image.  I also posted a little FREEBIE too from the packet so you can try it out.  

  Thanks for stopping by today!  Have a great week friends!