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Sunday, October 27, 2013

It’s My Birthday! My Real Birthday

Okay… so it’s my birthday today! Not my blogs or my TpT shop, but ME!

I’m blessed and grateful to be surrounded by an incredible family, extraordinary co-workers and some great blogging friends!! To God be the glory!  If you’d like to leave some birthday wishes please feel free, and you can help me celebrate because everything in my little old TpT shop is 20% off until Tuesday! Have a great day!

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Saturday, October 26, 2013

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.

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

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Got this great idea from Mrs. Tunstall.

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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.

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

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We also used her pumpkin writing papers.

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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

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Tuesday’s Question

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Wednesday’s Question

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Thursday’s Question

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Friday’s Question

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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.

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

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

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Roll of the Dice

Happy Friday Eve!!!!!

Yesterday I went to a professional development meeting about math. The topic was on CC Math Practice Standard number 1 which is:

Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

I am working really hard on providing my students with classroom experiences in which they can do just that. The math practice standards are the most important part of CC math, a least it’s what I think. I always look to them as a guide when I’m planning math lessons.

So as I driving home I began to brainstorm the different types of problem solving activities I could do with my students. I wanted it to be engaging on all levels…and boy do I have a wide variety of those. So here is the first activity I came up with. I leveled them so that all of my students could be successful.

First we did a few examples on the Promethean board. Then I handed out the sheets. They had to work for 5 minutes alone, and they could use any math tool they thought would help them. Then after five minutes I grouped the different levels together and they discussed their solutions. Then we shared out as a whole group.

I forgot to snap some photos of their thinking, but they really did well with it. If you’d like to try something like this in your classroom click o the picture and grab a copy. I didn’t do any cutifying but I hope you can use it anyway!  It was quick and easy to implement but I saw a lot of thinking going on. Let me know what you think.

 

Level 1

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Level 2

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Level 3

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Here is a video we watched on The Teaching Channel…Holla if you LUV The Teaching Channel! Even though she is a third grade teacher I found lots of good ideas I could use with my first graders. I love her Show Three Ways Sheet. I plan on tweaking it for first grade.

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Here is another wonderful video on counting collections. For those of you that use Investigations, this is like Mystery Boxes on Steroids!

 

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Tomorrow is Pumpkin Patch Field Trip Day!!! Yeah….Lawd help me. Happy Friday!!!!