Tricky Teens

We are in the dreaded teen number phase! Okay, it hasn't been so bad. My kiddos are doing fairly well with teen numbers - especially identifying them.

::Teacher yells "Yeahhhhhhhh!!!!!"::

My team and I always start teaching teen numbers around the last week of November - so we carry the lessons right up through Christmas Break.

Today we worked on the number 16. During our small group mini-lesson, we practiced writing the number, drawing tally marks, and filling in a ten frame. We then drew 16 Christmas Lights on the whiteboard and labeled them when we were finished drawing.

Bonus: If you call them bulbs, the kiddos love it. Mine were so excited to say the "funny" word bulb...haha!

For individual practice, each student drew their own set of Christmas lights - complete with 16 bulbs! I love how easy it is to differentiate this activity. I had kiddos drawing 10 frames and tally marks - just to practice.

::Teacher yells again "Yeahhhhhhhh!!!!!"::

Here are some pics of our drawings:

This activity hits two Common Core standards:


K.CC.3: Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects)


K.CC.5: Count to answer “how many?” questions about as many as 20 things arranged in a line, a rectangular array, or a circle, or as many as 10 things in a scattered configuration; given a number from 1–20, count out that many objects.