Read Aloud!

 

We love read aloud time! Teachers and students. And this story fits so well with our Michigan history and our study of the Erie Canal.  I hope to post pictures of the posters our students are making.  In this story,  an eleven-year-old New York farm girl travels with her parents to the Michigan Territory in 1836 by way of the Erie Canal, encountering unknown dangers and incredible hardships.  My third graders love hearing about the things in our social studies books. Just another way to make history become real!

Fact Families

 

We used this in our classroom when introducing multiplication.  We will continue to use it to reinforce the connection between multiplication and division.  We supply the number sets and the students fill in the fact families.  They can be cut and stapled into mini books for practicing facts, too.  I just posted this as a FREEBIE on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Another Snow Day for West Michigan!

This winter is not going away any time soon!  Record lows are predicted for overnight tonight, with the forecast calling for -5º or lower.  As of today we are in the record books for the second snowiest winter ever! And, COLD! We haven't heard about making up any days yet, but that may be coming.  We are running out of ideas for indoor recesses! I'm sure there will be plenty more of those after the snow melts and the playground turns to a mud bath.

I love SNOW DAYS!  However....I'm ready for spring!

Teachers Pay Teachers

 

 

All of my products will be on sale! Check out Spring Showers and St. Patrick's Day Fractions! I also have a new FREEBIE, Fact Families Resource!

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.

Multiplication is the Name of the Game!

I'm looking forward to using this resource with my class to assess their understanding of multiplication.  It is available at my store on Teachers Pay Teachers. We have been learning the vocabulary associated with multiplication.  We have used Marilyn Burns' lessons on Circles and Stars and Amanda Bean's Amazing Dream.  We have been using manipulatives to create arrays and have been writing fact families.  We have talked about equal groups repeatedly.  We have connected multiplying with adding and are showing the relationship between repeated addition and multiplication sentences.  I think they will be ready to show their understanding of multiplication by the end of next week.  Then comes the hard part of learning the facts!!! More on that later and our ice cream sundae incentive!

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!