Missing Number

Four afternoons a week I work for the Kiel School District as the Title 1 reading teacher for the parochial schools in the area.  Through this roll I have had the opportunity to assess student using our district's new standardized assessment called AIMSweb.  Three times each year the Kindergarten through fourth grade children are assessed using this tool.  By using it as a Title 1 teacher I have been able to create centers exposing the children to the skills needed to take the assessment. 

One of today's centers had the children find the missing number in a sequence of numbers.  This skill is one of the skills that will be assessed in kindergarten using AIMSweb.  To Begin the center the children played the following game on the smart board.  http://www.primaryonline.co.uk/sitetour/pol/findra.html  They then used dry erase markers to fill in the missing number on sets of cards I made.  To practice this skill at home you may want to write strings of numbers on a dry erase board or chalkboard and have your child fill in the number that is missing.  For example:  4, ___, 6 or _____, 8, 9 or even 52, 53, _____.

Another skill that will be assessed in kindergarten is when given two numbers can your child pick out the one with the most value.  For example:  if your child sees 8 and 4 can they conclude that 8 is the largest number.  To practice this skill in a fun hands on way you may want to play the card game called War.  When you first start to play you may want to take out the face cards.

War for two players

In the basic game there are two players and you use a standard 52 card pack. Cards rank as usual from high to low: A K Q J T 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2. Suits are ignored in this game.
Deal out all the cards, so that each player has 26. Players do not look at their cards, but keep them in a packet face down. The object of the game is to win all the cards.
Both players now turn their top card face up and put them on the table. Whoever turned the higher card takes both cards and adds them (face down) to the bottom of their packet. Then both players turn up their next card and so on.
If the turned up cards are equal there is a war. The tied cards stay on the table and both players play the next card of their pile face down and then another card face-up. Whoever has the higher of the new face-up cards wins the war and adds all six cards face-down to the bottom of their packet. If the new face-up cards are equal as well, the war continues: each player puts another card face-down and one face-up. The war goes on like this as long as the face-up cards continue to be equal. As soon as they are different the player of the higher card wins all the cards in the war.
The game continues until one player has all the cards and wins