Instructor Notes:

For materials preparations, click ‘Back to Main Menu’ button and select ‘Getting Started – EDC Setup’.

Read Every Day Counts Teacher’s Guide, Kanter and Gillespie, Great Source, 2005 or 2012 edition, p. 60-62.

This is a good time to practice saying all the months of the year appearing in the line up of Birthday Baskets, helping children see that December is the last month of the year. We can use the face-down Calendar pieces to watch the days left in the year come to pass one day at a time. See EDC p. 29 for another Countdown activity that children can take home and continue through New Year’s Eve.

To help children discover the new pattern, invite suggestions of a motion to use for the triangle and one to use for each square and act out the pattern. It’s easy to keep it going beyond the pieces appearing so far.

To help children recognize that any three-sided closed figure is a triangle, invite three volunteers at a time to “hook and look”, an activity suggested by coauthor Patsy Kanter. Ask each of the three children to use one finger to pull on a loop of string, resulting in each group creating a unique triangle with three sides and three corners.