Math the Pinteresting Way

Reading and writing were always my favorite subjects in school. Well, that and history. But through teaching, I've really grown to love math. There are so many fun things you can do with math. I also think the way I was taught math is so different than how we are encouraged to teach math now. I didn't have a good understanding of numbers or why we did math the way we did. Now we are encouraged to teach for understanding and not just memorization. I went to a few trainings when I first started teaching that were Marilyn Burns teaching. It was through this that I began to understand things like pi and circumference. So today I'm linking up with Just Reed for her 10 Pin party all about Math.

1. This first pin is from Sunny Days in Second's TPT Store. It's beach bump. My kids absolutely love the game bump. It is a great way to practice addition facts. She has all kinds of themes at her TPT store.

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467398090296/

2. With the adoption of the common core standards comes the adoption of the mathematical practice standards. I have been trained on them multiple times but I don't have them displayed in my room. I think it would help immensely to have these displayed. My friend Mary from Mrs. Lirette's Learning Detectives has some free posters in her TPT store. 

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467400607902/

3. This next idea is something I definitely want to make one of my first math work stations this year. It works on number recognition, counting and fine motor. But the picture doesn't like to anything. I think the idea is pretty self explanatory. (If this is your picture, please let me know. I'd love to give credit.)

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467397382055/

4. I love Maria from Kinder-Craze. She has great ideas and great products. This number decomposing activity will be a must for me and my kiddos next year. You can check it all out here at her blog Kinder-Craze. 

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467397913099/

5.This is another idea from the great Maria at Kinder-Craze. It is all about solid shapes. Check out her post here. 

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467399541401/

6.I love using picture books to teach. This pin leads to Love 2 Learn 2 day and her great list of books that go with different concepts. 

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467397425923/

7. I have been working on trying to implement math workstations or tubs in my room for the past 2 years. I am still trying to get it worked out. This pin is a great blog post from my friend Mary again. Check out her post here.

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467399702281/

8. Here are some more math workstation ideas. This time from Marsha at Differentiated Kindergarten. If you haven't checked her blog out you need to. She is phenomenal. These are some apple work station ideas.

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467400655726/

9.I love scoot games and so do my kids. This is one of the scoot games I have free on my blog for adding 3 digit numbers. The kids loved the crazy cat graphics.

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467400732703/

10. This last pin is another scoot game I made and use in my classroom. Paw Prints Addition scoot. I use it as a game and as flashcards. There are 3 different versions of the game depending on what strategy you are working on. 

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467400776602/

There are 10 ideas and pins all about math. I hope you found something you could use. Be sure to head over to Just Reed and check out the rest of the party.

By the way, make sure you are following me on facebook. I have a surprise coming up this week. Here's the link to my page, https://www.facebook.com/MsKerriAndHerKrazyKlass

A peek at our math stations for the week

I have only been back to work two days this week and I'm already way too busy. It's 5:15 am as I'm writing this post. I had every intention of posting last night but we took dinner to friends that just had a baby. It was way more fun holding a sweet baby and playing with their almost 2 year old. So here I am posting. I didn't intentionally get up at 4:30. I just woke up. I think I might have overdone it yesterday with my knee. So I'm blogging and icing it before work. I'm sure I'll be paying for this early wake up at about 6 today when I slow down. Anyway, I spent Monday at school not getting all the things done that I had planned for the work day. Instead I did a lot of talking. I surely hope I'm not the only one that has this problem when they return to work. I had lots of catching up to do. But I did get some things finished up yesterday. Part of that being updating my math workstations for the next 2 weeks. I am finally feeling like I've gotten the routine of getting them together down. Now if I could just get the routine of finding the time to do them down. Yesterday, I accidentally stayed outside a little longer than I should have. Whoops. I'm not going to feel too guilty because it's January and the days you can go out and play comfortable are few and far between. Anyway, I took some pictures of the different activities and I thought I would share. Some of them come from my Warm Up with Wintery Workstations pack. (You can find it here on TPT)

  I had a parent donate some money to the classroom as part of a holiday she celebrates in her culture. So I used it to buy these drawers at Wal-mart. This is the best way I've found to organize my math work stations. I keep it in the back of the room next to my desk, mainly because that's the only room I had for them. But they are on wheels so I can wheel it to the front to the room when I'm explaining what they need to do. (This is an area I really need to work on. The showing the workstations. Now that I'm creating some of my own and they stay similar I'm hoping that will help.)

 The white drawers have the games they can play in them. I usually have 2 pairs of students playing games so I try to have 3 options. Usually one option is a have to and one pair has to play that one first. I also try to have one game that both pairs can play. (Certain games they love) I've tried to make them games that we've played in class too so they already have some experience playing. One of the games is a subtraction game below. The game has two spinners and a game board. I like to put my games in the page protectors and it cuts down on lamination. This game they spin the first spinner and get a number. The second spinner tells them to -1 or -2. If they do it correctly, they move one space on the board. The game board has different things like move up 2, move back 1, and take another turn. (This is from my work station pack)

 The next game is bump. My kids are obsessed with bump. It's one of their favorites. I'm really not sure where this version came from. The file doesn't have a cover page or an author. I know I found it on someones blog last year. I hate that I don't know where it's from. If you made it, please let me know. I know Sunny Days in Second and Mrs. Lirrette's Learning Detectives make a lot of these.(A reader sent me the link. This one can be found at Spotlight on Kindergarten)

 I think the have to game is this addition matching game from my work station pack. It has the numbers 1-12 and then addition sentences that equal those. My kids are getting pretty good at this. Jennifer Knopf had a great fall one and then I made one for Christmas and one for winter. We probably will do something different next time. (My workstations usually last about 2 weeks or longer depending on the activity and what they need practice with)

 The next drawer has the ipods in it. I didn't take a picture of those because there is nothing exciting about them. I do need to work on adding some new apps. That was one of my to dos on Monday that just didn't happen. I'm thinking I'll bring them home over the weekend and work on it then. The next activities are problem solving activities. I'm not actually sure that other people would call them problem solving but it's the way I think of them. I have number cards for 1-50 and 3 different work mats. Two of them are working on number order and one is working on comparing numbers. They pick the numbers and then work through it. I should probably include a recording sheet but I don't have one right now. This is the first time we're doing this and I want them to explore some first. This is from my pack as well. (side note, I'm in love with these penguins. They are from the wonderful Nancy Messenger. Love her clipart. You can check her penguins out here)

This next drawer is for graphing. I try to have a different graphing activity each time. I noticed in some of our beginning of the year assessments this was an area of weakness. This time we're doing a survey. This is the first time I've had them do something like this so we'll see how it goes. We're short on copies at our school so I use the function that makes things half a page a lot. There are 2 choices. One has to do with making a snowman and the other hot chocolate. I got these from a winter surveys pack from the blog Of Primary Importance. (I'm now realizing the importance of cover sheets and putting my blog on freebies.) If you click the link, you'll be taken to her post with this freebie. She had several other choices for the surveys. 

 The last drawer is exploration. This time they are working on creating shapes different ways with pattern blocks. I took the sheet from our math series. It was something we worked on but I usually send these home for homework. They really enjoy being about to explore with different manipulatives

So those are our workstations for the next few weeks. What kind of activities do you use for work stations? Now that I have the stations all set up I need to work on meeting with small groups to focus on some skills. That's the next step to work on.
I have one last picture to share with you. Now that we are in the second semester I wanted to move the kids' desks. I haven't moved them since the first day of school. I can't do it by myself with my knee and I'm technically still suppose to be on light duty and not doing anything too strenuous at school. My assistant was going to stay yesterday and help me. But I had no idea where I wanted the kids. So after school, I took small post its and made a little chart to help me. Thought I would share the tip. I used those post it flags and had 4 different colors. It helped me to color code for each group so I could split some of them up and not have them with the exact same kids. So here's the finished product:

I love the colorful post its. Please tell me I'm not the only one obsessed with post its and school supplies. How do you move kids' seats around?

A Good Day and some holiday fun

So in the process of recovering from surgery, I seem to be doing an even worse job with blogging. Last week all I posted was the monthly currently. I'm just so tired in the afternoon that I don't feel like doing anything and not having internet at home is not helping things. But I taught a couple of good lessons today and had some good work going on and I thought I would share.
First up is our elf, Jack.

 He was hanging from an old projection screen cord with a post it on him. He had written notes on post its and left them all around the room. The kids thought this was really cool. I thought it was really cool, because they were reading the notes themselves. He also seemed to be spying on our reading corner which needed a little spying on. We had to have a mini lesson Monday to remind us about being book lovers not book bullies. When I told my husband this, he laughed for 2 or 3 minutes at the corniness of it. Oh well.
The next great thing was our reading mini lesson before read to self time. We've been talking about tools that readers use. I was having a hard time figuring out how to model this and let them practice as a group. But at about 2:30 the other morning I got a brain storm. I brought out a book that I had that has reading sheets on different holidays. We've been talking about Hanukkah. So I opened this page and then covered different words with post its. Some of the words I covered the whole thing. Others I just covered the last part of the word. I've been trying to get them to focus on getting their mouths ready for the first sound. It worked so well. The kids were word detectives and helped me figure out the words. It gave us the opportunity to talk about using text patterns and prior knowledge. It was great!
The third great thing was our verb lesson. We've been working on present and past tense verbs and I've been ready to pull my hair out over it. But I had seen this pin
It has past and present verbs on the lights. I had plans to make something like ths. But then I thought about how present tense verbs would look pretty cool on a present.
So today we reviewed some more and they gave me verbs. Then turned them into present tense verbs. The wrote them and decorated the word and then we made a present. I think we'll make a past tense verb christmas tree next week.

Source: theteacherscauldron.blogspot.com via Kerri on Pinterest

I've really been trying to get time in so I can work with kids one on one or with a group. I especially need this time in math. I've had math stations set up since last week but today was the first day we got to them.( They are my Mistletoe Math Workstation. You can check them out here on TPT. ) I tried having a third of the class working on class work, a third working on at a work station and then meeting with a group that needed some reteaching. The reteaching went well but my idea of how to make the thirds work did not. I think tomorrow they will all work on classwork and then when they finish their classwork they can more to their math station. I have about 3 kids that have no idea what we are doing in math unless my assistant and I are right with them. Then I have 2 that are wanting to multiply and are ready for it. I've been thinking a lot about differentiating and hope to have a post on that coming soon. The holidays are upon us and it's been a little crazy around here. I've been back and forth about whether to do a normal unit next week in reading or not. We have somethings we could use some review on and we have several fun activities planned so I'm leaning more towards not. I'm even thinking no homework next week. Not sure though. Do you try to stay as normal as possible as the holidays are approaching?

Math Workstations

So I spent some time this afternoon getting my math workstations set up so we're ready to go on Monday. I'm pretty excited to get this started. I've pre taught almost everything I want them to do. There will be a couple of things I need to go over with them and we need to discuss management. But I think this is going to be great. Here's my list of math workstations I have set up:
1. computer
2. Ipod
3. games
4. Graphing
5. Games
6. Ipod
7. Problem Solving
8. Exploration
I don't have a lot of wall space or board space to display a management board so I plan to use my promethean board to keep track of who goes where. Here's a picture of what that looks like:

I only plan to have them go to one workstation a day for right now. I can move the black rectangles with their names on them each day to show what station they go to.

Here are the ipods. They have a couple of different math games. There is Bugs and Buttons which is good, a math bingo and rocket math. They can choose to play one of those games.

This is the graphing center right now. This activity came straight from Debbie Diller's book. It is called grab and graph objects. I have put a variety of halloween erasers in the bag. They take a handful out and graph them. Then they have some math talk cards to answer questions about the graph that they made.

This is how I have my games stored. There is a different game for each drawer. These are all games that we have played in class already. There will be 2 sets of partners at this station so there are mulitple copies of the games in each drawer. This is the center with the most choice right now.

 This is the problem solving. For right now, students are working on finding ways to make 10. I have a sheet for them to record their findings and 10 counters. I also think I might add some unifix cubes to give them something else to work with.

 This is exploration. They  have a geoboard each and in the purple folder there are different designs for them to make on the geoboard.
I didn't take a picture of the computer because I didn't' see the point. But I'm going to have them play math games at abcya.com for right now. Eventually I'll add some activities from our math series and other things.
I have partnered the children up with someone who has similar math abilities. I want to be able to pull kids to work on things with them so I thought that would work best. My long term goals with math work stations is to be able to differentiate more and to be able to give them more choice. But I think this will be a good place to start.
Do you use math workstations in you class? How is it going? How do you have it organized?
I'm pretty excited I blogged two days in a row. Right now I guess my goal is to blog at least twice a week. I will hopefully get back up to 4 times a week soon. But my life is too crazy and I no longer have internet at home. Anyway, hope you had a marvelous Friday. I'm so glad it's the weekend. We had early dismissal today due to a rod run in town and the amount of traffic that causes. So I'm all ready for the next week at 4 pm in the afternoon instead of after 5.

Math Monday on Friday (Freebies!)

It's only been 2 days since I posted last but I feel like I've been neglecting my blog. The fourth of July was spent finally getting my part of our guest room reorganized so that Chris can finish getting his stuff put away. Not too exciting but we did go to a cook out at my sister's in laws and went to see fireworks. Yesterday I had every intention of getting something posted but I got busy working on my new sight word packet. I'm super excited about it. Plus the most exciting part was I got to met up with Natalie from Teacher Tidbits and another teacher, Cindi, who isn't a blogger yet but hopefully she will be. We had so much fun. I love meeting other bloggers and teachers that are just excited about teaching as I am. I know that we must seem a little weird meeting up with people we've never met before. But I feel like I already know the bloggers and teachers that I follow. It has been almost a year since I started my blog and I never expected this experience to be what it is. I have made some wonderful friends and have learned so much. I also think my confidence in my abilities as a teacher have improved and my students have been the ones who have gained from it. I didn't mean to get sappy, but blogging has just been so good for me.
Ok, on to some actual teaching content for this post. It has taken me over a week but I've finally waded my way through chapter 4 of Debbie Diller's Math Work Stations. There is a lot of information and suggestions in this chapter. It makes me excited to try out work stations with my kids this year. So here are my notes about the chapter and some ideas that I really thought were great.
This chapter is all about beginning number concepts work stations.
She starts the chapter with showing some real classroom examples of some of these work stations. She then gives a list what beginning number concepts are in Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. I really like this list because it gave me a jumping off point. She also lists some vocabulary words that are important for these concepts. I made some cards to go along with the terms that I'll share as a freebie at the end of this post. Then a good part of the rest of the chapter is all about some specific stations you can use. There were so many I couldn't even begin to tell you about all of them. Here are some highlights:

• Play counting games. I loved this idea because she suggests taking those board games that we probably already have like Hi Ho! Cherry O or Chutes and Ladders and turning them into a math station. Just playing the games is good for counting and one to one correspondence. But she suggested adding a spinner where they move one more or one less than the number they get on the dice. (I've included two spinners as a freebie too.) I loved that idea and will be adding those to my games in the fall as some beginning stations.
• Five Frame Fun: For each pair of students they need a five frame sheet that has 3 five frames on it (something I made for you in my freebie) , 2 ten trains of cubes of 2 different colors, and a number cube with numbers 1-5. I think you could also use number cards. Tie first kid rolls the number cube and puts that many cubes on a five frame. Then the other child does the same. They have to fill their five frames with 2 rolls. Like 1 and then 4. Of 2 and then 3. The first one to fill all three five frames wins the game. What I like about this was her math talk cards she includes. The students need to say "I have ____. I need _____ more to get to 5." She suggests making a math talk card on an index card to include in the game. I made one as  part of my freebie for this chapter.
• Memory - I liked the idea of having students match dot cards to numerals or to number word cards. I was going to make a game like this but I just didn't get it done. Plus I thought I might just use a bingo dotter to make a game for this one.
• Grab and Graph objects - Have a "grab bag" where you place several different treasures like counters, plastic insects, beads or small toys. You need several of each item. A kid reaches in the bag and pulls out a handful of items. They work with a partner to sort, count and then graph the objects. The graph is an object graph rather than a paper graph. Diller includes some math talk sentence frames for this too. There are more ______ than ___________. There are fewer ______ than _________. There are the same number of _______ and __________. 

There are a bunch more number concept work stations that Diller talks about in the book. But these were some of my favorites. She also includes what math concepts you need to make sure that you teach and she offers a few suggestions to go with all of the things you need to model. Another section that I really liked was the connections to problem solving. Diller gave some great suggestions. One I really liked was to make number sheets. On a large piece of paper you write a number 1 through 5. Then you write "if the answer is _____, what is the question?" The students work in groups to write words, pictures and numbers that fit the question. I thought that was a great idea that I plan on implementing in the Fall.
Diller also explores potential problems and how you could solve. My aha moment was with the problem of kids playing a game once and then announcing they are done. She suggests including 5 tickets with the game. Then the winner of the game gets a ticket. They keep playing until all the tickets are gone. Brilliant!
I hope that I've shared something that you can use. I'm really enjoying reading this book and highly suggest getting it if you haven't. Here are my freebies, I made. If you download them, please leave me some love. I've stopped using Scribd because so many people were having issues downloading it. So I just used google docs. So click here to get the files.
I'm linking up with TBA's Freebie Friday. Be sure to check out all the freebies being offered.



I will hopefully be back tomorrow with my post for Daily 5 and some information about my new packet I've been working with a freebie or two from that. So be sure to stop back by.