Wednesday WOW 2/5/14 with a FREEBIE

Here it is Wednesday and time for Em @ Curious Firsties, Wednesday WOW!

WOW, I was talking to a friend from church, she and her family have only lived here since June. Anyway I said something to her about turning 54 in March, she said, "You're kidding, I thought you were 45!"  Wow that made me feel good! Then the next day she sent me a text. she had asked her husband how old he thought I was, his answer was 42! Double WOW!!! I really don't think I look that young, I think having a 10 year old threw off their guestimator! But it did make me feel good, even if it's not true! lol

WOW! Don't you love it when a lesson turns out great? We have been working on place value    

            the last week or so. While perusing through Pinterest,  I found this from Jennifer Oyler

I loved the idea, but before I had a chance to do it with my firsties, 

I found this idea on Amy Lemons' blog Step into Second Grade

So I sort of combined the two ideas. I didn't want to do their first name because some of my kids have nine letters in their name. So I decided to have them do their initials.The day before we were going to do it, I showed them an example using my initials. We did have to have a discussion on what initials were. I told them to make sure they knew what their middle name was when they came in the next day because I wouldn't have time to look up everyone's. I also told them if they had more than one middle name to pick out one of them to use. 

So we started out reviewing my initials to make sure they remembered what we were doing. Then I put a copy of the alphabet  on the smartboard. I highlighted the parts of the letters we thought we should use "longs". We decided as a class that the "Cs", "Gs", "Qs", "Os", and "Ss" would have to be made using only "cubes". Here's what we came up with.

After that we sort of set up an assembly line to get our materials. I gave each child 10-12 "longs", if they needed "cubes" they had to cut them. They put their initials on construction paper and then I made a recording page to go at the bottom.

Here are a few of their pages. The first girl does not have a middle name. What they did was write the initial and then count what it was worth. Rozlyne's R was worth one long and 16 cubes or 26. The challenging part was to then draw it using the tens and ones of the number (2 longs and 6 units). I'll be honest, I didn't think about that being a little over their heads when I was planning it. I had them come up and I worked with the ones who needed help. It was cool to see the lightbulb come on as they"got it".

It was interesting to watch how they made the letters, as you can see this little girl struggled with her M.

 On Arabella's, you can see that they also had to count all of the longs and units and then write what their initials were worth. The next time I do this I will have it on the recording page.

I really liked this activity and the firsties did too. I think we are going to try it again instead of doing initials, I think we may do words from the -ar family or the -ay family. Practice a phonics skill and a math skill in one!

If you are interested, here's the pages I used. I did add a page for with four slots to record the word families so those who wanted a challenge could do a word like play.  BTW there are two blank hundreds charts. I printed them both on one page because I wanted to use 9 x 12 construction paper.

Base Ten Names

Can you believe it? We just hired a kindergarten teacher at the beginning of January and at the end of January our other kindergarten teacher retired. We only have eleven regular classroom teachers and this makes the second one to retire and we have had one to quit. Our PE teacher also quit, but she had just finished up getting a nursing degree. It has been a tough year for our teachers and an even tougher one on the children. Seven out of the eleven classrooms have had students juggled around due to the teachers leaving. I don't know what is going to happen with this new development. I'm hoping that we will be able to hire someone quickly. Most of the days the kids have been split up into different classrooms, as you can imagine kindergartners with a pack of papers isn't a good learning situation. :(  

Since the new kdg teacher hasn't been trained in the easyCBM (and she can't log on to the site), I have been trying to get the kinders tested during centers and my plan time. Yes! I only have 4 left to test of 49! It will be a big WOW when I finish. 

I found this on pinterest the other day. I really liked it.

source

Stay warm, we are having bitterly cold weather the next few days here in Oklahoma.