Math Review

Teacher confession time...I am SO not a math brain.

Math is what knocked me off of academic honors in high school.

Dang you, trigonometry.

I think part of that is that I was a TERRIBLE problem solver until I was in my early twenties.

If I reached an obstacle I expected someone to tell me how to figure it out.

I even had to (problems with transferring a few times, mind you) take 5 semesters of math in college.

I went to school for 6 years, so that's actually not THAT bad.

Thank my lucky stars that one of the members of my team has a math brain.

She has really taken math under her wing this year and become our resident expert.

Right now, we are finishing up a rotation where she teaches my nuggets math three days a week.

One of our "master teachers" (we are a TAP school) suggested that we do a math review each day.

His former school did this in order to incorporate Common Core standards (and those awesomely terrific standardized tests that we willingly and gladly do each year) into our every day routine.

Here is an example of what we are doing this week.

The nuggets are working on fact families, adding multiple two digit numbers, quantity discrimination (which one is bigger), and adding coins.

We have worked on many other topics already this year.

We do this daily.

I hand these out facedown.

My nuggets get 5 minutes to work on the problems. 

When the timer goes off my nuggets put their "desk offices" down and we go over it together.

They are required to fix what they have gotten wrong.

I walk around the room while they are working to make sure that they are actually trying to do the problems and not just waiting for the answers.

This entire process takes around 10 - 12 minutes total.

Each Friday my nuggets take a quiz with two questions for each topic on it.

I grade those and if 80% of my class passes a section it gets replaced with something else.

I have seen major growth in my nuggets.

I had some who were still struggling to add 2-digit numbers but can now since they have had daily practice.

I'm a fan.

We have been doing this school-wide and I am extremely excited to see our math ISTEP scores!

If our Acuity (a pre-ISTEP measurement tool) scores are accurate we will have an excellent passing rate!

Woot woot!

Laters,

Mrs. B

Jet-Puff Place Value

I am very happy to announce that today is my last day of school before 12 days of spring break!

Yaaaaahoooo!!!!!!!!!!

Surprisingly, my nuggets have been more "on" these last two days than all of last week.

I took advantage of this and tested their brains out yesterday.

They took 10 tests.

The rhyme I used with them (I rhyme with them A LOT) was, "If we test today, tomorrow we can play."

I made sure that there was plenty of learning going on but wanted to make sure that they were rewarded for working so hard.

(The fun sure has been sucked right out of teaching, but there are still many ways to put it back in!)

So, I decided to introduce place value to my nuggets using this idea I found on Pinterest last year.

I adapted it for our second grade standards so that we worked on numbers to one thousand.

What you need is:

2 bags of normal sized marshmallows

1 bag of circular cereal (I chose generic Fruit Loops, but Cheerios would do, too)

1 box of toothpicks or smallish skewers (I got the smallish skewers this year because the toothpicks were a bit too short)

strips of paper with thousands, hundreds, tens and ones written on them

(I stupidly bought double of everything...that's what happens when you forget to go to the store the night before and have to go at 6:30 in the morning.)

Have your nuggets place their toothpicks into the marshmallows and stand the marshmallows up in the sections of the paper strip.

Then, have them place amounts of cereal in each place value area to represent a digit.

I forgot to get a picture of this, but I then had them write the digit underneath each place value area, place the comma in the correct spot, and read the number.

We worked together for a little bit.

I challenged them a bit by asking them to add a certain amount and see what the new total was.

For example, the number was 345.

I asked them to add 200 to the number and then change the appropriate digit in the written number.

After they began to get the hang of it, I had them create any number they wanted to at their seats.

They then walked around to each other's desks and read the numbers that they had represented with the cereal.

It was amazing to hear the nuggets who really struggled to read longer numbers at the beginning of the lesson read them fluently and without much hesitation.

Being a reflective person, I immediately tried to figure out how I could have made it better and even more concrete for my nuggets.

When I do this next year, I am going to create a worksheet to go along with it so they have to write it down on a piece of paper and accumulate multiple numbers to read instead of just one.

Ok...now that I'm done with this...I am off to start my spring break!

(After a 4:30 meeting, though.  Seriously.  Who schedules a meeting about school on the last day at 4:30??  That is cruel and unusual punishment.)

Do you have anything exciting happening this weekend??

Laters!

Mrs. B