I’m Having a SALE!
I’m having a 20% off sale Sunday, November 25th through Tuesday, November 27. If you wait until Cyber Monday, you will get whipped cream and a cherry on top as Teachers Pay Teachers will add 10% off of my 20% off sale which means you will get a total of 28% off of any of my items. Many other sellers will be having sales, too, so come on over and check it out!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving to all my followers and visitors! There is something to be said about being thankful. No matter how successful or happy you are, being thankful reminds you of where you have come from and of what is really important in life. Being thankful keeps you humble and keeps you from taking things, people, and freedoms for granted.
I am thankful for all of you, visitors and followers. I remember when there were just a small handful of you! I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. May you enjoy your time with family and friends.
Are Your Students Mixing Up the Hour When Telling Time? Try This
Yesterday, I modeled a lesson in a second grade classroom for students who were struggling with telling time to the nearest 5 minute intervals. Students had the classic problem with telling time. When the hour hand was close to the next hour students mistakenly wrote the hour an hour ahead. For example, when students read the time 8:55, they would write 9:55 instead because the hour hand nearly touched the 9. To alleviate this confusion I used and adapted the idea from the free Georgia Curriculum resources (page 57). Unlike the clock instructions in the Georgia resources, I used sentence strips which I cut up, and paper clips which I threaded through the holes. I ran out of brads, so I used what was available.
To begin my lesson on time, I stretched out the clock on sentence strips in a linear fashion. Then I held my hour hand clock arrow under the numbers and moved it along and asked students what hour it was. I explained to students that until the arrow point was directly on the next number AND in this case color, that the previous number still remained the hour. Students proved to be more successful in telling time on an analog clock after this discussion.
Then after the discussion with the linear clock using the hour hand, I had several student helpers hold the clock in a circle so that they could see how the linear clock compared to the round clock on the wall. I repeated my questioning holding the hour hand in between the numbers and asking them what hour was being shown.
Could the Thousands Blocks in Your Classroom Be Causing a Misconception?
Students who struggle with number sense aren’t sure how many 10’s are in 100, how many 100’s are in 1000 and so on. Because of this I work on this skill often with students in my intervention groups. On more than one occasion, I have found that students even as old as fifth grade have a misconception about the thousands block. Now that we have math tools made from plastic instead of the vintage wood ones, some students are confused when they lift the thousands block. They realize the plastic thousands block is hollow, so when I ask them how many hundreds are in a thousand, they count the sides and say six. I have to correct them and have them just stack the hundreds blocks until they are the same size. Then they realize that 10 hundreds make 1000.
Integrate Math and Literacy for a Halloween Costume!
For our fall carnival, we dressed up like a book character. Me being the math coach, I wanted to incorporate literacy AND math. I decided to become “The Greedy Triangle.” The librarian says that kids LOVE this book.
I looked everywhere for cardboard large enough to make a human sized triangle and finally found some in the storage room–chart paper boxes. The bottom of the triangle is as large as the box. Unfortunately, I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to be equilateral like the true Greedy Triangle. I’m isosceles, but that leads to some great geometry discussion with kids!
I covered my front and back triangle with yellow bulletin board paper. Then I made the mouth eyes and nose with white and colored paper, and just glued it onto my front triangle. I just drew the eyes and nose and mouth free handed, and outlined them with marker. I folded the eyes in half so I would have a symmetrical shape. The cheek circles I made by tracing a round cup. A teacher next door helped me staple the yellow ribbon, which I had at home, to the two triangles. The costume fits over my head like a sundress. Underneath as you can see I wore black tights a black cotton T-shirt and skirt which I already had. I would say this whole project took me one hour and cost me nothing–not bad.
The costume isn’t user friendly however if you plan to sit a lot. The cardboard doesn’t bend of course. When going in and out of small areas I found that my vertices would bump into a lot of things. However, this was a plus because I was able to use math vocabulary all day such as….”watch out for my vertices.” 🙂
I received lots of complements on this costume…some “aww how cute” from parents, kids, and teachers. One parent thought I was pizza…but then where are my pepperonis? I guess I could be a happy block of cheese, too! 🙂
With that said, I suppose you could adapt this costume to many things when trick or treating…
Picture this…
“Trick or Treat”
“Hi, honey, what are you dressed up as?”
“A block of cheese, but I’m lactose intolerant.”
“Oh, honey, here’s some extra candy!” 🙂
Need Activities to Teach Counting?
I was so excited to get these unifix books that I ordered. With there being a shortage of counting activities in our regular kindergarten textbook, I was eager to find more. These simple and practical books for kindergarten and first grade offer several counting activities like the following:
- Shapes that students cover with cubes to see how many cubes will fill the shape. Students count the number of cubes that fill the shape.
- Cards with a different number of shapes on them that students match to numbers cards.
- Number cards to match to plastic baggies with cubes in them.
- Games like “First to Fifty” in which students spin a number spinner to draw a certain amount of cubes to cover a board. Students can count how many they have left to cover.
There are some other good number sense activities included also. These are available at Didax for $13.95.
Bulletin Board On Fire!
For the past two years we have honored students who scored proficient or advanced on the state benchmark exam by displaying their picture in a creative way on the wall as soon as you enter the school. Our principal told us this year that our theme would be “Let’s Keep the Torch Burning!” That sparked the Olympic theme idea to make our Wall of Fame. We decided to make gold medals for each student and place their picture on each medal. The gold circles were cut out on a Cricut from gold scrap book paper. Then we hung the medals on red ribbon in the hallway with the students’ names below their picture. We originally wanted to hang the medals on red white and blue ribbon, but the store we ordered from wasn’t able to order an additional ribbon.
Then we placed a torch scene on the adjacent bulletin board to finish out the Olympic theme. The large gold fire “bowl” is a plastic flower pot spray painted gold that we had cut in half…thanks to one of our teacher’s husbands. The fire inside of the bowl is held up with a semi circular piece of corrugated cardboard with holes punched in it to hold the white Christmas lights and twisted cellophane. The torches on the sides are made with gold poster board rolled up and stapled. Then red, orange, and yellow cellophane are stuffed in the top to mimick fire.
To give the board more pizazz, we included Christmas lights stapled behind the red and yellow cellophane both in the fire “bowl” and on the bottom of the bulletin board. We set the lights on a glimmer setting so that the flames actually look like they are flickering. Covering the lights first with red cellophane helps hide the dark green cords. Then layering with yellow and orange adds a nice fire effect. Thanks to one of my followers who told me about an Olympic theme that she was incorporating with tiki torches for math fact races. She said that she used a battery operated candle inside the torches to make them look like they were burning. This gave me the idea for using Christmas lights.
All of the kids, parents, and staff who walk by exclaim things like….oooooh! cute! pretty!
We know that we have definitely put a spotlight on the kids who worked so hard last year.
Decimal Number Line: Project Completed
I am posting a follow up of the lesson I co-taught with a fifth grade teacher. The earlier post shows the number line that I made for students to model their number line after. I had planned to have students do a different section of hundredths so that we would have a large number line from 0 to 1 tenth compiled of different students’ number lines. I decided not to have them do different numbers than I had shown on my own number line because I saw that students were struggling with the idea of counting by thousandths in discussion before they did the task. The whole project took about 2 days for almost all students to finish. Below I have pictured two of the students’ number lines that turned out well. None of the groups quite had time to write the midpoint between two different hundredths like I have in blue….five thousandths, fifteen thousandths, twenty-five thousandths etc. Even though students muddled through this and had a difficult time getting started, I would do this lesson over again. I probably would spend more time examining decimal number charts first so that students would more quickly recognize number patterns to write them on a number line. To save yourself some time if you want to build these number lines see the measurements I used in my earlier post.
Student Decimal Number Lines Counting by 1 thousandths to 1 tenth
Teacher Decimal Number Line
You Will Need These to Help Your Students Count Past 100…
I made the Hundreds Chart Number Cards to 1200 to push our second and third grade students towards counting higher numbers. I found a need for a chart that extended past 100 or even 300 after doing some basic counting assessing with students. This year, we gave all of the students in grades 1-5 a counting assessment to see how high they could count. We asked them how high they thought they could count. Following this question, we had them start counting by ones starting ten back from that number. So for example, if a student said they could count to 200, we had them begin counting at 190 and count until they made an error. We noted the number they counted to and their errors. Doing this proved very revealing, and helped me know where a lot of misconceptions about basic number sense are occurring. Now I am seeing a need to continue practicing counting and exploring patterns past 1000. Some students can count to 1000, or even 1009, but have difficulty after 1009 or 1099. They often think 2000 is the next number. That is why I have made these numbers to give teachers a tool to help explore these patterns up to and past 1000. I specifically created this set of numbers for third graders who are having just this difficulty but this could be used with any grade level K-5.
How the Hundreds Chart Number Cards can be used:
When students have learned to count 1-100, higher numbers may be placed on the hundreds chart to recognize patterns and generate discussion. For example, you may decide to place numbers 51-150 on the chart so students can practice counting past the 100 century. Also, you may put 3 hundreds charts together on top of each other in your classroom and begin with 1-300 so students can see patterns among different centuries. When students have learned 1-300, the cards may be replaced with higher numbers such as 301-600, 601 -900, and so on.
The Hundreds Charts Numbers may be used in a variety of ways. Use the numbers for daily counting and number recognition. The numbers may also be used for other activities. For example, remove some of the numbers from the chart and hand them out to students to put back into the empty spaces. In order for students to place the number back in the chart, they must explain the pattern they used to place the number. The cards may also be used for pattern recognition of multiples or even/odd numbers. If copying lots of color is not a problem, the red and white cards are provided for pattern recognition. For an ink saving version, use the black and white version to copy multiples on different colored card stock.
These will fit in the hundreds pocket chart you may already own. Just click the picture below. This will take you to TPT to download the numbers.
New York Performance Tasks
I just wanted to share another free common core resource with you. Performance tasks from New York. There are some good ones, but not as put together as the ones from Georgia that I posted recently. But still you can search your grade level and topic to locate good resources to teach many standards. However, they aren’t all covered yet, but it is worth your time to look!
Click below for the link:
