My extended time working with the best Kindergarten team is over. I am sad because it reminded me of the people I use to work with when I was teaching in the Seattle area. I am sad it is over but happy that the teacher I was in for is better and ready to return.
I had so much fun teaching subtraction lessons in Kindergarten the last week and a half using Envision Math Topic 8. I supplemented and differentiated the lesson with a few fun activities that I thought I would share… Printables will be free at the end of the post.
To teach the vocabulary in the lessons, I created picture word cards that the students could easily read by looking at the picture to recall the word and it’s meaning…
Eventually, when the word minus sign was introduced, I shared Linus the Minus with the group.
Linus the Minus is a naughty lad,
always taking away.
He is O-So-Bad!
When Linus comes around you end up with less!
He makes a difference, but he will never confess!
Eventually we took Linus and all the vocabulary words we learned and placed them on an anchor chart…
We did a few extra activities to differentiate the lessons…
The kids really liked my loosing teeth friends. I laminated the little faces and named them after kids in the class. I added teeth to get a total number (big number). Then we blacked out teeth to take teeth away. Then we talked about the subtraction sentence we made. I did this in both small groups to reteach and whole group at the start of the math lesson. (I am adding these little people to my sub bag… because they can probably be used again in a K through 2 lesson… Just need dry erase markers)
I created an activity sheet to match this lesson, that we never got to, but I had it just in case… If you use this, you can use it in many different ways. Write out the subtraction sentence and have the kiddos draw the teeth and black out the ones lost. You could draw in the teeth and black out the ones lost and the children would write the sentence. You could do both the drawing and the sentence and ask the kiddos to come up with the answer…
We had a puppet show as an assembly one day and I created a little stage that I laminated along with some favorite puppets. I told addition and subtraction stories and we acted them out on the puppet stage. I just used Velcro to attach and unattached the puppets from the stage.
The majority of the printables seen in this post are free to print and can be found in the link below.
Click to download the free subtraction files
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