One challenge I’ve consistently seen with entering 1st graders is reading number words! The first few weeks of school is the perfect time to give ample opportunities to recognize, read, and spell those tricky number words. This skill goes hand-in-hand with the critical subitizing practice (recognizing a given number without counting) and number sense needed at the beginning of the year.
The introduction is best done through music! You can click here for my 1st Weeks of 1st Grade playlist of favorite YouTube songs.
The Scratch Garden song and Number Words Rap are catchy and effective!
The kiddos sing these songs while making words with Playdoh on their mats. After they have made the word, they turn over the mat and use bottle caps to build the words. These mats have multiple representations of the numbers to practice subitizing. Print these mats front/back for self checking. Click here for a free sample of number mats 1-6!
To continue the hands-on fun, we use puzzles to reinforce reading the number word and subitizing numbers to 12 using ten frames!
My students have a “Number Word” booklet we work in each day. On the first day of school, we complete #1, the 2nd day we complete #2, and so forth. This gives them a chance to open up their new crayons and represent the number in multiple ways! They practice coloring, spelling the word in boxes, writing on handwriting lines and using the word in a sentence. Great time to celebrate using capitalization and punctuation for our beginning writers!
Differentiated Number Word Stories!
This is my favorite activity to wrap up number words! I have three beginning of year reading passages (with 2 different levels each) for the kids to circle the number words and draw the objects in the story. Picture clues are given for our very beginning readers. š Having the two leveled options makes it easy to give a task perfect for each kid!
You can find all the number word activities and more by clicking here for my full Number Word Resource!
And just in case you missed the link for the sample FREEBIE:
Number Word Work Mats
Best of luck to you teaching your littles to become number word masters!
Jillian Duguid