Buddy Games!

One of the most popular rotations during our math workshop time is always "Buddy Games"! The one in the picture above is Frogs and Lily pads. The first player rolls 1 die to determine the number of lily pads needed.  He or she rolls again to determine how many frogs on each lily pad. Then that player writes the repeated addition sentence and the multiplication sentence for the frogs and lily pads. This is reinforcing the basic concept of multiplication and helping our students learn basic facts.

Math Workshop

We have been doing BUILD workshop during our math time this year! We recently introduced multiplication. In our "U = Using Manipulatives" center, kids have been using sentence frames to explain arrays.  In the picture, our student is looking at an array of gingerbread men.  He uses manipulatives to re-create the array.  He explains that there are 2 rows of gingerbread men and each row has 6 gingerbread men in it, for a total of 12 gingerbread men.  We use Evernote to record their work.  This has been very successful!

Flexibility!

We started 2014 with 2 snow days tacked on to Christmas Break!  Then the day we came back, we had 17 of our 54 kids missing! (Did I mention, I co-teach, all day every day with my fantastic teaching partner?) Rather than start all new centers for BUILD (our math rotations) and DAILY 5, we scratched our lesson plans and did some "random", fun learning! We used some TpT Freebies I had collected over break and some stories that were begging to be read and had kids actively participating for the last 2 days.  I need to remember to take pictures!

This Week....where did it go?

I'm home on a Saturday morning, sipping coffee and listening to Christmas music by our beautiful tree! I'm feeling so blessed!

We are making some good progress in our classroom and just in time to include some fun holiday activities!  During our Literacy Block, we use Daily 5 (our version of it) and just completed a nonfiction unit on Natural Resources. We use BUILD during math time and just completed our addition unit and started subtraction.

We "lost" two students and gained one! We have 53 in our combined classroom.  As winter break gets closer, the excitement in the classroom builds!  We have a holiday concert this coming week and we've been starting every day practicing our music. We have a box of Christmas books we will be using for Daily 5 and a fun Math game, incorporating 2 step story problems.  Stay tuned....I hope to post some pictures!

Hang in there....winter break is coming!