"Greater Than" Math Lesson

Something that I find very important when teaching math is providing multiple means of representation to help different kinds of learners to grasp the material. This picture showcases just one of the ways that I made learning physical for my kindergarten students during a math lesson about greater groups. 

 

In this picture, I have taken the visual strategy of comparing groups, as required by the textbook, and made it kinesthetic by having the students become the groups that they were to compare. For this matching strategy, the textbook provided pictures of two groups of counters of different colors that the students would match up by drawing lines between them. Whichever group was left with an additional counter that did not have an opposite pair was then determined to be the "greater group."

 

Instead of using the worksheets provided by the textbook, I had students from our desk groups come up to the front of the room and sit on a line of tape. If the students were sitting across from another person, they were asked to hold hands as a way to create a physical line between them. Then, as a class, we would count how many kids were in each group, record those numbers on the board, and the students at their desks would hold up a colored paper with their answer to help me visually assess their understanding of which group was greater. ​