Math and Literature, Poetry and an Organizational Idea

Happy Saturday! I can’t believe I’ve been back at school for three weeks! The time has just flown by!
Tuesdays in my class is a day without Specials (music, art, Spanish) so I’m able to have a longer math block. I always like to feature some sort of big problem solving activity, which is usually linked to literature or what’s going on in our classroom. Here are a few examples.
I love the book One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab.

It really gets the students thinking about skip counting and counting efficiently. After reading the book for a few days I gave them this problem to solve.

One week we read Rooster’s Off to See the World and completed this problem solving activity. I think I got this idea from Marilyn Burns. I’ve loved her professional books since I first started oh so long ago! If you haven’t used any of her products, starting with her Math and Literature series of books would be a great way to get your feet wet.


On Tuesday I gave them this classroom based problem to solve. I forgot to snap pictures of their work. The class earned ten points for following classroom rules, and being complimented by other teachers and administrators in the building. I let them vote on which treat I would bring. We used the graph as our weekly graphing activity. Then the next day I let them have a go at the problem I posed.

If you’d like a copy of the three activities we’ve done so far, click on the picture below.

We’ve also started our weekly poems. I love the My Very Own Poetry Collection books, by Betsy Franco. I have the kindergarten and first grade editions.
 
I usually type them up for use on my Promethean board. On one page I’ll leave out the high frequency words, then the next page will have blanks so that they can create their own poem.

Here are a few examples.

Then on Fridays we illustrate the original poem and place it in our poetry journals.

I haven’t taken as many pictures as I usually do, but here are a few snapshot from the past three weeks. I will try to do better for the next post.
Exploring math tools.





Idea!!!!!

I found these little babies at The Dollar Tree.

             

They are perfect for the card games we use in Investigations. I printed labels with the game title and BAM!!!! Great, easy storage.

     
If you made it to the end of this post then I’m sending you a subliminal piece of chocolate as a treat for sticking with me. Have a great rest of the weekend!