Five for Friday

I'm joining Doodle Bugs Teaching for her weekly linking party, Five for Friday.

I have been going crazy the last month or so with pencils. A couple of my rascals were breaking them in half, brand new pencils!!! I had two boys in particular that were changing out their pencils probably 10 times a day.  I had read a blog post from the Ladybug's Teacher Files HERE about the Great American Pencil Challenge last year. I decided to give it a try. Let me tell you, it is working like a dream! I gave each student 2 new pencils. I wrote their number on the pencils with a Sharpie and then wrapped a piece of tape around it to keep it from rubbing off. We just finished up our second week. Three students are out because they lost their pencils and had to get one from me, but both of my pencil breakers are still in and  I may have to sharpen one of their pencils during the day. I just couldn't believe it would be this successful. We are going to keep it going till their is only one person that still has a pencil or school is out. In that case all of the kids that still have pencils will get a prize. I can say I have been sharpening a lot less pencils since we started the challenge.

I got a nice surprise the other day! I gave the kids a math page to do and is usually the case I have some fast finishers. I told them to turn their paper over and write their own story problems.  We had just started working on them so I wasn't sure what I would get, I thought they did terrific!

BTW I said I was proud of their story problems...not their grammar!

We were working on number collection boxes one day. I told the kids they could choose their number. This little girl bit off more than she could chew. She chose 200. She wrote, "Sorry I can't finish." and "Sorry I don't have enough."  How could I count it wrong! lol 

Anybody like frog legs? We had a parent meeting at school one evening. One of my former students got bored and decided to pull all of the legs off of the frogs we had made. My daughter caught her doing it. This was the scene the next morning. 

The only frogs that still had legs were the ones that she thought were colored the best! Hahaha 

I guess I got into a major recycling mode. I had cut out a kites that the kids had used to write important facts about Ben Franklin. I had a bunch of left over triangles. I was going to toss them but then I thought they would work to do fact families. I gave the children a planning page that they used dominoes to get their fact families. After they completed the planning page, I gave them 2 triangles and 2 rectangles and a piece of butcher paper cut in half. I had the kids work in pairs. I told them they were making "Fact Family Avenue".

After I took these pictures, we went over the numbers in the fact families with a Sharpie because 

I realized they were not showing up.

 It was fun to watch the groups. The girls really got into it, they added lots of detail, while the boys did the bare minimum. Ha!

 These two girls had a Day side and a Night side!

 The two girls that made this one, labeled  all of the things in their picture!  : )

Have a great weekend!

Teaching Intercession and Spring Break!!!

We started working on number collection boxes right before Spring Break. Last year, I worked and worked with my firsties and some of them never did "get" it. This year, i don't think I really did anything differently, but most of the firsties seemed to grasp the concept a little better. I made one and explained it as I went, we made one together and then I gave them a piece of paper to make one by themselves. I was kind of dreading looking at the pages, but I was pleasantly surprised, most of them did a pretty good job. The next day we looked at some of them and then I put them into groups of threes. I thought that the ones that were struggling might understand it better coming form a classmate. I gave each group some dice to get their number and a piece of poster board. I told them that all of the groups that worked together would be able to use markers to finish their poster. That did the trick, they all  were working nicely, well I did have one that did have a bit of a struggle.

Here are a couple of the finished products.

The pink and purple circle WAS a clock showing 5:00 before someone got a little color happy with the markers. ;P

One of the boys in this group asked me if he could put the 11th month. :D

Last week , I was technically on Spring Break, but our district offers a full week of intercession for students are struggling. I was thrilled that I got to invite some of my students this time. We worked on number collection boxes a little more, but this time we glued "stuff" on to make our collections. Here is a picture of one, I forgot to take a picture of some of the better ones.

I think the doily is supposed to be a clock. lol

Here are a few things we did to introduce fact families to them. I thought it would benefit them to get a step ahead of the class.

We also worked on reading words cvc words and then add  Magic E.

Open the flap to find the magic E.

We worked on words families.

I used several pieces of construction paper for these. I folded them in half  and stapled them together to make a word family book.