The Haps in Our Room

Happy Saturday! I’m just going to get straight to it! We’ve been up to quite a bit since I last blogged…so get ready for a lengthy post with lots of pictures.

Owls

We just wrapped up our two week owl unit and we had a blast! The highlight was dissecting owl pellets! My students were so excited! Here are a few pictures.

 

We used resources from Mrs. Jump and Kristen over at A Day in First Grade.

 

 

Got this great idea from Mrs. Tunstall.

We talked about vocabulary words related to owls, and completed a tree map. I gave the students the strips and they had to decide where their strip would go on the tree map.

Then we completed some wonderful writing about owls thanks to Lori at Teaching With Love and Laughter.

 

We also used her pumpkin writing papers.

 

Math

If you follow me on Instagram then you know I got this book in the mail not too long ago.

I love this book! It’s a really quick read and it’s all about putting the Math Practice Standards into action in your classroom. Like I’ve said before these practice standards are really the meat of CC Math. and I’m trying really hard this year to make sure they are present in every area of my math instruction.

Here’s a simple activity that I’ve started and it’s so easy to implement! It’s called Focus on the Question. This activity related to Make Sense of Problems and Persevere in Solving them. This is a simple classroom technique that addresses multiple problem solving skills. 

You present a piece of data to the class on Monday then on subsequent days you pose a different problem in which students must use some or all of the data. You talk each day about what you are being asked to solve, what data will help them solve it and how they would go about solving it. The class discussion centers around not the answers, but on the steps to solve the problem. So I created this flip chart. Each day we discussed the problem being asked and what steps we would take to solve them. It only takes about 10 minutes and we discuss the questions during our Math Morning Meeting.

Monday’s Question

Tuesday’s Question

Wednesday’s Question

Thursday’s Question

Friday’s Question

My students really go into the discussion and it allowed me to assess what they knew and what they were thinking. I plan to add this as a weekly activity during morning meeting.

I also try to have a different situational story problem each week. Here’s what we worked on this week.

Problem: Ms. Arnold went to Target to get Halloween treat bags. The bags came in three bags per pack. If there are 21 students in our classroom, how many packs of bags will Ms. Arnold need to buy? They had to show their thinking using pictures, words or numbers.

I’ve also started creating differentiated story problems for my students. They. Love. Them. It’s a great way to challenge everybody!!!!

Okay…so thanks for hanging in there with me! I’d love to hear your comments!