Kathy Schaw (math interventionist) has been working closely this year with our kindergarten team around math assessments and instruction. She has introduced many new teaching tools to us as teachers, and the latest are Rekenreks! Kathy wrote a grant and got materials for us to each have a large class "Rekenrek" and materials to create a class set of mini rekenreks to use for instruction. She came in yesterday and demonstrated how to use them with the kids.
The main idea of rekenreks is that there are two rods- each with ten beads on them. Each rod has five red and five white beads. The kids use them to "build" different numbers by sliding beads over to one side. This helps children learn to decompose and see different groups of numbers. For example the number 6 can be seen as 5 and 1 more, or 3 and 3. Being able to break apart numbers in this way is an important foundation to the skills they will need in first and second grade!
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