Number Gators, a Preschool Introduction to Greater Than and Less Than

We had a wonderful extra day of preschool today (still making up for so many snow days).  One of the things I love to do when teaching reading is to utilize highlighter tape.  Right now we are using it heavily to point out where long vowels are in words and where we need to use our strategy called "puzzle" to find parts of words we know or can already sound out (including digraphs like 'th' and word families like 'ing'). (See pg 25 of this free download for the reading strategies we use after we learn all the letter sounds.)

 Today was the introduction of our new math unit: Writing and Comparing Numbers.  We didn't do any writing of numbers today but had our fun preschool introduction to greater than and less than.  We learned the end of this Number Gators song and played with these free printables and our kitchen items to determine which alligator would eat which pile of food.  It was a great way to introduce greater than, less than, and equal to.  I also switch the words back and forth also using "bigger than", "smaller than" and "the same as" to scaffold the vocabulary learning.