Ten frame painting with Q tips!! (freebie included!)

Allright, when I saw a blog post by the amazing Mr. Greg at Smedley's Kindergarten Smorgasboard, I was totally inspired!!  I loved the idea of painting with Q tips for the fine motor practice and for the concentration it would take and I knew I could tie it in with our ten frame activities for the week!!

All week long, we were working with ten frames and practicing the concept of "10 and some more".  We practiced that when we see a ten frame with all the dots filled in, we don't even have to count it- we already know that it is 10!  From there, we just count on and get to the correct teen number.  We even tied it in with addition and some of my smarties were really catching on!  We were writing number sentences from 10 on the 2nd day of school!  It was awesome!

We had a district math training before school and some of the math coaches showed us a few ideas we could use.  One of them was a giant five frame and ten frame to show the kids the concepts we were practicing.  I made mine with green masking tape on poster board and laminated it so we could write on it with dry erase markers.  Here's a picture of it right after I made it, I forgot to snap any pictures of it in use!  I will have to do that next week when we use it again.

We also used this number book freebie from Ashley Reed throughout the week.  I really liked using it and my kiddos did well with it.  These pages are what led us into discussions about number sentences.  It was the 2nd or 3rd day of school and I just wanted to see what they were ready for, but a few actually had suggestions for what to fill in without any prompting from me.  We really looked at the numbers past 10 and made connections between the 2 ten frames.  For 17, we knew that the top frame would be filled all the way in (building that automaticity of knowing that it is already 10 without having to count) and we knew that we would have 7 more on the bottom frame.  That led us right into building the number sentence of 10+7=17.  It was great!

So on Friday, I thought we'd do something fun with ten frames, because everyone loves Fridays, right?  I messaged Mr. Greg and let him know that I loved his blog post and wondered if I could "steal" his idea of Q tip painting.  And because he is such a stand-up guy, he said Of Course!  (He really is awesome, if you haven't checked out his blog, then you are missing out!!)

Here are a few pictures of us painting our ten frames with Q tips!!

Click the picture above if you'd like to download the ten frame pages we used for our painting fun!  We'll be working more with the concept of "ten and some more" this coming week.  It'll be a quick week for me with Monday off for Labor Day and then being gone all day at a district reading training on Wednesday!

Thanks again for the inspiration, Mr. Greg!