buttons come and buttons go

We have been working with combinations to five in different ways. We have built combinations to five using buttons and have solved button story problems within five. Buttons have provided the children with endless opportunities for developing their counting and cardinality skills as well as operational thinking! 

We can solve button problems and show our thinking using tiles or math hands, drawing a picture, using numbers and words, or writing an equation.

On Monday we read a familiar math story about missing buttons; Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons. On every page Pete loses a button and we take away (subtract) one. The children eagerly read and sang the repeating words and parts of the story together. 

We used the illustrator, James Dean, as a mentor for creating our own math art. Through their art, the children solved and showed a subtraction problem in two ways; with a picture and an equation. 

How many buttons on Pete's shirt? How many popped off? How many are left?

Briana made us a sign for our math art and we have shared our work as mathematicians, artists, and readers in the common area. 

As part of our learning, we introduced two new sight words; no and go. We noticed those words repeat throughout Pete's story; Oh no! Buttons come and buttons go. We talked about how no and go both have one part and rhyme, with o sounding like it's name at the end. We reread the words, singing out the story of Pete's groovy buttons.