The Bunk Bed Problem

It’s Tuesday! Three days closer to Friday! Ha!

Today during our math morning meeting Promethean Board style,  I posed this problem to my first graders.

 

I called a few students up to show different ways that all of the children could fit onto the bunk bed, some on the top and some on the bottom. After we did this  I let them pair up and I gave them different numbers to find combinations for. My more advanced students were given a larger number. They recorded as many combinations as they could in their Math Journals.

 

I got this idea directly from this website. I love it, there are so many math activities to download! I created my own bunk bed mat. Click the picture below if you’d like a copy.

 

Have a Wonderful Wednesday!

Little Red Riding Hood Was Rotten

Happy Monday! Last week and this week we are talking about story structure. With an emphasis on character analysis. We’ve read Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks.

Today we did a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood and tomorrow we will read one of the books from this series!

   

 

I love these books! They are in the same vein as The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. I scooped them up from Amazon. I figured what a perfect opportunity to introduce a little opinion writing. In Little Red was Rotten the Wolf tells the reader that he’s a vegetarian, and if it were apple season he wouldn’t have eaten Little Red….yeah right!

Tomorrow we’ll complete this during whole group time.

Click on the picture for your freebie!

I also got a few emails about sharing our apple graph, so I have that for you too!

Have a terrific Tuesday!

Apples and Testing Out My Blogger App

Just a quick post to the kickoff to our two week trip to Apple Town..."Won't you take me to Apple Town..." Now that song is going to be stuck in my head! I'm posting this from my blogger app, hope it goes okay?

Here are a few pics:

              

 Here is our morning meeting question. This month we're using single loop Venn diagrams.

Then we took that info and created a bar graph.

                

                   

I know it was short and sweet, but I promise I'll be back later with more! Have a Terrific Tuesday!

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!

Correction on Name Ten Frame Freebie

               CORRECTION      CORRECTION    CORRECTION
You know the old saying when you assume you make an A$$ of you and everybody else...well it's something like that. Well it's true for the former. It turns out today is my turn to make an A$$ of myself! Ha!!!

When the presenter at my inservice shared the idea I just assumed it was something she thought of and I wanted to do it in my classroom. It turns out the the idea for the Name Frame came from Mrs. Nowak, over at Fun With Firsties! She even has it as a freebie in her TpT Store! No idea! I would like to take a minute to apologize for my goof up. I know how hard we teachers work at creating things for our classroom and it hurts if someone claims our babies as their own. I made a mistake and for that I'm truly sorry.  So with that being said, I offer my sincerest apology to Mrs. Nowak.
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Hey everybody! My school year is off to a great start! I have 21 little firsties and we’ve accomplished a lot during the last three weeks. Hopefully I can get a post done this weekend?????
I posted a picture of this on my Instagram account and got lots of requests.

I was at a math in-service and the presenter showed a picture of this from her classroom. Her kids did it in their math journals and I loved the idea! I tweaked my copy a little and added Melonheadz clipart. Click on the picture above to get your copy!