Rachel Counts (in more ways than one!)

I am enjoying Winter Break, a chance to catch my breath in the midst of a busy school year. We are in the Smokies with family for the holidays. This has given me lots of good time with granddaughter Rachel, who reports her age as three and three-quarters. Like her father and uncle when they were this age, she delights in patterns and numbers. We count pennies as we play dreidel. We count blocks and toys and the cookies we cut out of the sugar cookie dough. We count cards as we play Concentration (Memory), where she shows a strong visual memory. Her number sense seems to strengthen every day. We were building with her baby sister's blocks one day. We had established the previous day there were ten of the soft rubbery blocks in all. We were trying to recreate a structure we had built the day before, but could not as some were missing. She carefully counted out eight blocks. I asked her how many were missing. She thought for a moment. "Two! " she announced. Later we found one of the missing blocks and added a bear to the structure.

Who Knows How the Time Goes?

Telling Time is a usual topic for kids this age. Over the years, as digital clocks have become more common and analog clocks have become rarer, I've had to give thought to how much emphasis to put on telling time with an analog clock. While a digital clock is easier to "read," an analog clock, to my mind, gives a clearer sense of the passage of time and fractions of an hour. So while some of my students report that they do not have even one analog clock at home, I continue to spend some time on working with analog clocks. We use mini instructional clocks so that each student has one and can move the hands as we try to both set certain times and read times from the clock. I think one reason learning to read an analog clock is challenging for some students is that the numbers mean different things depending on whether you are looking at the hour hand or the minute hand. For concrete thinking seven and eight year olds, this can take some getting used to.