Taking Inventory
Introduction
There are many opportunities in the early childhood classroom to stress the connection between counting and obtaining useful information. How will we know we have enough pencils, or chairs, or pieces of paper, or blocks, or dress-up clothes if we don't count them and represent on paper how many we counted? During math time, create inventory teams that are assigned different areas in the classroom of which to take inventory. The children may carry clipboards and paper so that they can immediately record the results of their counting.
Materials Needed
- A classroom full of objects to count
- Clipboards, pencils, and paper for each child
Background Knowledge
You may want to have introduced children to the concept of counting for real-life purposes, but this is not necessary. It is helpful if all children in the class are able to count to ten, but this also is not necessary. You can assign children to take inventory in different areas of the room, depending on their facility with counting. For example, I might have a less-experienced counter take inventory of the tables in the room while I have a very experienced counter take inventory of the blocks in the block area. Children should be familiar with the idea of recording what they count with tally marks. It is helpful if you have already designated groups and decided what areas each group will be responsible for counting.
Teaching
As your students are gathered together in your class meeting area, tell them about a situation in which you needed to count or "take inventory" of something in the classroom—for example, another teacher borrowed the class set of scissors and when she returned them you wanted to make sure she didn't return too many, so you had to count them. Tell your students that people out in the world often take inventory of supplies to make sure they have the correct number. Tell them that they will be working in teams to "take inventory" of classroom supplies.
Activity
Provide your students with clipboards, paper, and pencils. Send each team into the area it will be working on. If you feel more comfortable having children work at their tables, you can provide each table group with four or five collections of supplies to count. Make sure that the numbers of objects don't exceed what they can handle counting independently. They can work together to count and record the amounts in each collection.
Share
When you come back together to your class meeting area, have your children bring their data with them. You may want to go around the circle and have each child report back to the group about which object they counted and how many there were. It can be helpful to discuss what surprised the children. Help them draw real-world conclusions from the data they have collected. For example, if you have a situation in which you discover that there are not enough pairs of scissors to go around, you can discuss with your students what you could do about the problem.
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