Ms. K
Have You Played This Game to Strengthen Number Decomposition?
I learned this simple but powerful game–Make Ten from Melissa Conklin of Math Solutions at NCTM two years ago. The first and second graders at school have successfully played this game for several days to help strengthen their number sense. They have already become much more fluent in recognizing the sums (bonds) of ten. Make a deck of ten frame cards. Downloadable for free right here (Free Ten Frame Cards). Copy the printables four times so you have enough to make a deck. Students lay out four cards from the deck face up on the table between two to four partners. (I think the game works best with pairs). Then students take turns to pull two cards that have a sum of ten. If there are not two cards that have a sum of ten then students may pull one more and place it face up in the middle of the table until there are a set of two cards that will make ten. When students pull the pair of cards from the center of the table, they say the equation that matches, for example, three and seven make 10 or three plus seven equals 10. After students have played the game once or twice, have them record their equations in their journal. I highly recommend playing this game to build number foundations to ten.
I am also posting a clip here of a ten frame SMART Board slide I made for my K-2 teachers to adapt to their specific needs. This slide has all of the ten frame cards on it from 0-10 and would be great to adapt for many Math Solutions lessons such as this one.
How Can You Use Your Hands as Multiplication Manipulatives?
Another math coach related to me today the story of how a student she taught had named fingers sections as something that comes in groups of threes. She took this concept and helped students use this to develop multiplication strategies to learn their threes multiplication tables. Fours multiplication tables can be learned as well if students include counting the top part of their palm. See the pictures below for more clarification.
Update September 2017: Due to one of the comments below, I made a video describing how this works with the 3s multiplication facts. Click here for the video.
How Can You Teach Common Core Standards with Number Bonds
Well, I have let my blogging activity slide as I have been trying to give more attention to developing my materials for Teachers Pay Teachers. My sales have done better this year than ever–I suppose due to the work I put in on some lesson activities from this summer. I have TONS of math activities I could sell that I have made over the years for all grade levels however to sell them I want them to be perfect so it takes me a while to make them look as good as I want them to look.
I hope you will be pleased with the most recent activity I posted today. First graders at my school are working on becoming fluent with their number bonds (sums) up to 10. They have been building number bonds with two colors of snap cubes and then coloring a model of what they built. They have been using the printables I just uploaded to TPT. I also developed a Smart Board lesson to match the number bonds printables since one of the first grade teachers reported at our last planning meeting that the students were confused about how to write an equation. The Smart Board lesson allows the teacher to model the bonds of ten with snap cube virtual manipulatives and move the symbols, and numbers around to build an equation. See below. Click on the picture to read more.
How Would You Feel If Your School Drug Tested Its Teachers?
In Illinois, the teachers union in the Illini Bluffs school district have currently been on strike for 8 days in anger over having to be drug tested. Students are unable to start back to school because of the lack of teachers. The district is taking applications of temporary substitute teachers so that students may start back to school. The teachers union resents the drug testing as a power move. I however think that the school systems in any state could potentially get rid of poor teachers a lot more quickly if they would allow drug testing so I am in favor of the idea for the betterment of the children. What do you think? Should teachers be drug tested? For more about this story, click here.
Help Strugglers with Rounding by Using This…
To alleviate misconceptions that crop up when teaching rounding, use a number line that counts by the number you are rounding to. For example, if you are rounding to the nearest 10, then have a number line that counts by 10’s. If the number is 34, students will be able to find that the 34 will fall between 30 and 40.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Often students will assume a number like this rounds down to 20 because they see that the 2 in 20 is before 3 in 30 so it only stands to reason to students that 20 is the number 34 would round down to. When students are able to see a number line, they are able to actually visualize which ten the number is closest to. For a free number line that counts by ten click here.
Wow! Free Math Smart Board Lessons, Power Points, and Printables
To save time on making a number line with math fonts, which is a bit tedious, I decided to search online. I stumbled over this WONDERFUL website full of fabulous math freebies. There are math power points, smart board lessons, printables, flashcards and the like for primary students. Just to name a few: one to one correspondence smart board lessons, number lines 0-100 printable, and counting by grouping objects power point. All of the many downloads on this site are especially good for the common core standards, which focus so heavily on number sense and counting for primary students.
How Do You Keep Your Retired Bulletin Board Materials Organized?
After you take down each bulletin board, keep the border, pictures, and other materials in a medium sized plastic tub or box. Label the boxes by months. Keep your bulletin board tubs stored in your room by month and add to the boxes when you find additional decorations throughout the year. When the season comes for your bulletin board the following year, you will easily find all of the materials you need stored in your organized tubs.
How Can You Make Finding Author’s Purpose Easy for Students
I recently attended a Maria Banks training, and she suggested ways to help students identify the author’s purpose for writing a passage. Below is the list of clues that we developed to help students identify a passage. I am sure there are more that we didn’t think of that can be added. To help students identify these, create a chart in class with the students, and make an anchor chart of author’s purpose clues.
Download Author’s Purpose chart here.
You Can Use this Fabulous Tool to Build Word Walls
Post-it definitely had teachers in mind when they developed these repositional lined sticky notes. These sticky word strips are great for word walls, to help highlight a word on anchor charts, or to label items in your classroom. This tool allows teachers to easily create a print rich environment. They are also colored, so they easily allow for coding the stickies by topic. For example all life science words could be green. Since they are repositional, I like to leave them on my white board while we are learning the concept, so I can write a definition or draw a picture with each word. Then move them over to the word wall later when we aren’t currently using them. I can always move the words back if we work on them again. I highly recommend these to anyone wanting to teach vocabulary! Target carries these and I usually can pick up a package for about $5 before school begins.
Try These Compelling Fall Pumpkin Activities…
I so look forward to a crisp fall day after the humid triple digit temperatures we have had in the south. I am already wanting to hang my fall wreath on the door! Maybe it will hasten fall weather. 🙂 With the fall weather I always think of this pumpkin unit I taught with my precious third graders in which the students all did math investigations with pumpkins. The following are pictures of the activities we did with the unit. I also made the lessons available on Teachers Pay Teachers. I added one lesson to it –pumpkin lines– to make it a full week unit. We measured pumpkin’s weight, circumference, height, and counted the seeds (eeew so messy, but fun!) Take a look below.
Body Benchmarks: Inch Thumbs
Pumpkin Height
Doing Pumpkin Calculations from "Pumpkin Patch Math Investigations"
Yuck!
Counting seeds
Making Arrays to Count Pumpkin Seeds
Pumpkin Seed Arrays
Total Counted Seeds from One Pumpkin
