Today I had the opportunity to attend the Florida Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference that is being held in Jacksonville. The first session I attended was The Ants Go Marching. The presenter was Dr. Karol L. Yeatts from Warner Southern College.
Her session talked about using a study on ants to teach math and science. Some of the pre-number concepts she talked about were sorting and classifying, seriation, patterning, comparisons, counting and number relationships. She shared a list of ant facts she likes to teach her students. Did you know that ants can appear in shades of green, red, brown, yellow, blue or purple? Also an ant brain has about 250,000 brain cells. A human brain has 10,000 million so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human.
Dr. Yeatts also shared many games like Hide and Seek with an ant to teach spatial awareness, matching ants to number cards using raisins for one to one correspondence and singing and marching while singing The Ants Go Marching to teach seriation and Counting.
Dr. Yeatts shared a list of her favorite books to use during her ant study. Some of the stories are books that are familiar. Ant Cities by Arthur Dorros, One Hundred Hungry Ants by Elinor Pinczes, and Hey, Little Ant by Phillip Hoose are a few she showed us.
4 comments:
I can just picture you marching like an ant around the room. Thanks for the great info!
The ants go marching one by one, HORRAH! HORRAH! Thanks for sharing your ant experience. I can't wait to see what we learn tomorrow!
Thanks for sharing you ant experience with us!
How cute is this! Now this makes a kindergarten teacher WANT to do Math!
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