Counting BORING???? Not Anymore!!!!

Yep. As a Kindergarten teacher, you know that you have to practice counting to 100.....a lot. We do it just about every morning. The kids are bored of it. Some won't even participate. I have to agree....it gets old!!! But, we HAVE to do it if their counting is going to be fluid, automatic and without error.

Well, I've been focusing this year on how to get ALL of my students more engaged ALL of the time. I've been researching Whole Brain teaching. I LOVE sooooo many of the ideas in this program, but just don't think that I personally could implement it entirely into my teaching. So, I've been trying out ideas and thinking of ways that I can make it work for ME and my kiddos in my classroom.

Counting was definitely one of those things that I knew I needed to improve on. So, I started thinking of ways that I could get all of my kiddos to actively participate and have fun with it!! I came up with counting voices. You can check out the Counting voices sticks in my TPT store by clicking on the picture below.

I know that I'm probably not the first person to think up this idea. Ha! It's actually a pretty obvious way to help make it fun and get the kids involved! Whyyyyy didn't I think of it before???

I made these little counting sticks to hold up so that the kids know what voice to use. I just laminated the sign and hot glued it to jumbo craft sticks. The direction cards can also be printed, laminated and hot glued to the back of the stick so that anyone can come in and know how to lead the kids in counting with their voices :)

Here is a little video one of my parents took of us counting! We are new at this and have only done it a couple of times....so, we aren't perfect yet!!! But, you can get the idea! Ha!!! In this video, the voices we use are: boxing, turtle, sheep (my favorite), Elvis (the kids fave), pig, runner, mouse, fish, kisses and air writing.)