This winter, we have been working on creating a completely new book full of fun worksheets to reinforce the numbers 11-20, and now Counting Creatures 11-20 is finally finished! My class has had a ball trying them out, and I have been itching to tell you all about them, but there wasn’t much point in telling you about a product that wasn’t yet available at the time! But now, the book is completely finished, and I must say that I think that it is a GEM! I haven’t yet seen a workbook full of activities that were focused exclusively on the numbers 11-20, so I think it will be very useful for those of us that need something else to give our students that are still struggling with these tricky numbers.
But first, I want to show you some of our GREAT entries for our video contest! We are absolutely thrilled with the response this year!!! These videos make my day each time they come in. I just LOVE them all!!! It’s going to be really tough to choose a winner.
Here’s a fun one from Mrs. Demus’ class in San Dimas, CA! My kids just love the Black Song from Sing and Spell Vol. 2 every year, without fail! This class looks like they are loving it, too! Be sure to check out her class doing the Orange song as well, at our YouTube site HERE.
Here’s another great one from the Dowdle Family! They filmed their three kids singing the Ar Pirate song from the Sounds Fun DVD! Their kindergarten boy is reading the word family words in the corner of the screen as they are shown on the video, and their little three year old is singing and dancing along, as well as their ten year old! I love how the whole family is involved and singing together. That’s how a family should be, and what a smartie that little guy is, to be reading all those words while only in Kindergarten!
Here’s another really fun entry from Mrs. Meier’s Kindergarten in Boyne Falls, MI. The energy of these children could provide enough electricity to light up a small town! This is sooooo much fun to watch!!!! They are singing the She Song from Sing and Spell Vol. 1, and the 1-100 Song from Musical Math and Jumpin’ Numbers and Shakin’ Shapes. I get exhausted just watching it!
Finally, we have the Me song from Sing and Spell Vol. 2 from Dana Shadwick’s Kindergarten class in Joplin, MO! The kids are adorable, and I love their enthusiasm! The winner of our video contest last year, Kerri Rea, was also from Joplin, MO. Must be a great place to learn!!!
We’ll announce the winners next week, so keep your eyes peeled for that. For more video entries, check out our YouTube page HERE.
And now back to the number book! Just like the Counting Creatures book for the numbers 0-10, this book starts out with a count and move-along poem, but this time the children are counting out much larger numbers! Also, we are not simply clapping this time, we are also jumping, hopping, running in place, stomping, slithering, roller skating, digging, patting our legs, doing crossovers exercises, and squishing imaginary bugs! It’s loads of fun and the children just adore it! Here’s a sample video from our dear friend Andrea Gibbs and her wonderful first grade class!
The children in my class also just BEGGED to
color the pictures that went with the poem, so I printed out a bunch and let them color them as much as they wanted during their playtime.
My favorite way to use the actual worksheets is to use them for homework, but I also put them into dry erase sleeves and then let the children at the table simply and fill them in with dry erase markers. This type of activity is always very successful for me and my class always enjoys it! I’m not sure why dry erase markers make any activity so much more fun than doing it with a pencil, but they sure seem to make a difference. Plus, I love the way children can do as many of the worksheets as they like when we work this way. And many of them seem really excited to see how many they can complete in the given time.
I think that if I were to run some of these worksheets off on card stock and laminate them, I could cut them up and make some learning centers out of them, too! Children could sort the creatures into groups of elevens, twelves, thirteens, and so on. They could probably also sort them other ways, too. I think I am only just scratching the surface of the different types of games that could be made out of the pages of this book! If you have any other ideas, I would love to hear them! And be sure to check out this free download of only a sample of the 102 pages in this fun workbook!
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