Nature and Counting: It All Adds Up

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling

• Tell your students that they will be going on a walk outside to collect objects for their addition projects.
• Have students count their objects as they collect them. Use addition vocabulary as they add to their collection. Say, "You had three acorns, and adding one more makes four. Now you have a total of four acorns."
• Instruct your students to find approximately 10 objects.

Guided Practice

• Pass out plain paper or math work mats along with small manipulatives, or have your students use their objects from their nature collection.
• Model making addition sentences with objects. Show students how to write the corresponding numeral under each grouping of objects and write the addition sentence.

Independent working time

• Have students take out their nature collection bag.
• Provide sentence strips, pencils, and glue.
• Encourage students to sort their groupings into a number sentence, and have them glue the objects on and write the total on the right side of the sentence strip.