Happy Sunday! Well I survived the four day math in-service and I came away with a few good ideas. One of which I wanted to share with you. Some schools in our district, including my own, are using Investigations. I like it overall but there are tons of other things I add from the many resources I have.
For the last five years I’ve been doing math in the morning and let me tell you it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Part of my math in the morning is Math Morning Meeting, which fits perfectly with the routines in Investigations, plus a few of my own.
Our presenter shared how she does morning meeting using Power Point, which was a good way of organizing it because everything she did was right there in her slide show. Then later on I was visiting one of my most favorite places on the internet, The Teaching Channel and watched this video. You should watch it too, then some parts of this post will make sense. It’s really short and you’ll love it!
Well, after watching I could have kicked myself! Why wasn’t I doing it this way all along. So I created my own morning meeting presentation to help me keep on track and get through morning meeting effortlessly. Here are the slides I created. I’ll give a brief explanation of each one. I plan on getting this done in the 10-15 minutes I’ve allotted for math morning meeting.
The first routine will be what Investigations calls Start With Get To. It’s really just practice with counting. But I’ll also use Count Around which I got from this book.
Sometimes instead of doing Start With Get To we’ll do a count around by tens off decade, or by two starting at a number other than two, or count backwards by threes and so on.
I’ve talked about Guess My number before. Basically I’ll pick a number in my head and the students have to guess. If I chose five and someone guessed 8 I’d say my number is less than 8, and they would have to tell me what numbers could be eliminated by covering them with a red square (equivalent to my sticky note). As the year progresses I’ll add different numbers or even replace this slide with a hundreds chart.
This slide is directly from my Promethean Board Calendar. I just decided to remove it from my calendar and put it in the morning meeting slide.
At the beginning of the year we’ll build the Hundreds chart using ideas from this book.
Then later in the year I’ll use the hundreds chart the way the teacher did in the video above.
Here’s where I’ll use the dot cards. If you’d like to read about how I use these you can click
here. On the What Did You See slide I’ll write their combinations and sometimes they will write along with me in their math journals.
During this part of math morning meeting we’ll discuss part, part whole. In the video she uses cards like the ones below. There is also a file that goes along with the video of the cards like she used. They started at 12 and went to 18. But I created a set for smaller numbers (6-10). To create the cards all you do is cut out the boxes on both sides, then fold the pages over.
Click on this picture to get the 12-18 cards.
Click on this picture to get the 6-10 cards
This part is pretty self explanatory. I’ll have a few problems that will involving using strategies to solve, like making a ten, or doubles plus one. To increase the novelty I’ll drag each problem from behind the brain.
At the beginning of the year this part will involve combinations then it will become a mixture of combinations and story problems.
Well there you have it! Even if you don’t use Investigations I hope there are some things you could use during your math time.
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