It is teacher appreciation week!! May 3rd & May 4th TPT will be having a site wide sale! Take this opportunity to stock up on all those wish listed items! My top wish listed items on my site are......
This product is great for Read Across America week! Lexiled passages perfect for guided reading time!
Fast and slow changes to the Earth -Cause and effect! This product has 5 passages with text evidence questions along with an activity and a cut and paste worksheet to follow the activity!
Visit our TPT store to get this recourse for teaching fast and slow changes to the earth with cause and effect!
This is a very popular resource in my store! Multiplication fluency checks! These are one minute test on multiplication facts! This product has 16 levels of multiplication facts. It also come with a recording page so you can keep track where each of your kiddos are. A new addition to the product is the practice flip book!
I keep one file folder full of the entire fluency set. Right before I eat lunch every day I write go through to see who is on each lesson. At the end of the day I see who passed and I hand out new practice flip books.
If we have time we practice together! I have each child sit back to back and switch flip books. Then one person will ask their partner a multiplication fact from their flip book. They go back and forth until I say switch and then they find a new partner! Great activity for when you have five minutes!
I absolutely love teaching math! This is a great time to get the kids learning, engaged, and excited about their education! Math is a perfect way to bring in some great hands on materials and still be learning the content.
This week we have been learning about area and perimeter. Look what we did!
To introduce the different between area and perimeter, I started by making shapes around the room with duck tape. (The shapes are on the ground.) A few kids got to each shape. I would say everyone stand on the duck tape. I told them to walk around the tape. As they were all walking around their shapes I explained they were walking around the perimeter of the shape.
Then I told them to stand in the middle of the shape and to walk up and down boxes inside the shape. I told them you are in the area of the shape.
We did this a few times. I had them regroup back at the carpet and go to a new shape where we did it again. We did this about three times. Then once we got back to the carpet I had them turn and talk to their partner about the difference between area and perimeter.
To complete the lesson, we did do a worksheet for a quick assessment. In the worksheet they highlighted the perimeter of each shape blue and colored in the area red. You can get this freebieee here!
The next day we used the shapes to find the perimeter and the area! Much more fun on the floor!!We used a recording sheet to record our answers! You can get the recording sheet here! We did ours in the hallway! :)
The next day we found our own shapes! We got with partners. Each pair of students had two dice, one piece of graphing paper, and two different colored pencils. Each player choose a color to use and wrote their names with their color on the top of the paper. (This way I knew who was who.) Player one would roll both die. This gave us the two sides of the rectangle. The player that rolled the die would draw the rectangle with their color on the graph paper using the numbers he rolled. For example if he rolled a 4 and a 2 he would draw a shape with 2 squares going down 4 going across to make the area 8 square units and the perimeter 12 units. Inside the shape the would write the area. Next to the shape the wrote the perimeter. They loved making their own problems!
Every kid loves post it notes! We Found the area and perimeter with unit blocks! I wrote the area and perimeter of a shape on the board. Each student had several unit blocks. They made the area and perimeter out of the unit blocks. You could also use post-its, squares of paper, or cheese its!
We went back in the hallway and learned how to use the distributive property to find the area of a shape. I added an odd shape to our original shapes. They had to come up with two multiplication sentences to each shape. Then they were add the answers to get the area. Then find the perimeter. Get the freebies here!
We also used differentiated task cards throughout this unit! We used the task cards to play scoot as well as extra time fillers. The cards have area and perimeter problems as well as word problems! Each card comes with a QR code for immediate feedback! You can find these task cards here!
Check out these other posts about doing math without a worksheet at Mrs. Wills Kindergarten. How do you do area and perimeter?
In March we decided to take a HUGE leap and participate in a blogger meet up, and let me tell you what. IT WAS AMAZING! We were both very nervous to get out of our small town comfort zone but we did and we met some GREAT people.
On that Friday, I took off work (and had to prepare for my very first substitute teacher. Which was tricky! Especially with flexible seating and daily five!) Anyways I took off work so we could drive to French Lick Indiana. We only had a 3 hour drive which wasn't so bad with Erin from Erin's Ink and Katie Mense from Little Warriors.
As soon as we pulled up to this beautiful resort we saw our roomies! Now we met our roommate on the Facebook group page. Therefore, we were both extremely nervous about finding them, liking them, hanging out with them...the whole 9 yards. BUT we could not have met a better group of people! I have truly made new friends that I hope we stay in touch with! It is so hard to find people who you click with, have similar ideas with, and enjoy hanging out with but we found them! Hanna Friend from The Friendly Teacher, Megan Porter Mitchell from First Grade Roars, and Kayla (blog in construction) were our lovely roommates!
Back to when we pulled up! It was so bizarre... We are getting asked to vale and I turn my head for a second and I said "HEY I THINK THAT'S HANNAH!" So we ran into the hotel so we didn't lose her because my phone just died and we had no other way of getting a hold of her! Sure enough it was them. Couldn't have been any better!
That night we all went to the casino. It was Jessica's first time at a casino and she won $6! She was very excited after she watched us all lose our money! :)
The next morning we were able to sleep in, which was almost the best part considering I have not slept past 7 since Raelynn was born! She is now 15 months!! As much as I missed her we all need a good get away sometimes.
On Saturday, we had a full day of fun! We began with entering the amazingly decorated room by Holly Ehle from Mrs. Ehle's Kindergarten Connections and her team. We were excited to get our name tags.
Holly introduced people and we watched several great videos!
Here is one that I suggest watching. Great inspiration!
Because there were soooo many people, we did an activity to introduce everyone. Every table received a letter. Everyone at the table put their name and blog name on the letter. Then one person from the table would introduce the table. Eventually, the letters spelled out ......
This was our theme for the weekend. This quote has been in my head ever since. Great motivation.
After we were all introduced we participated in a series of round table discussions. Many different topics! We were strategizing were to go because there were so many we wanted to go to!
After our round tables we moved onto a teacher tool swap!
I got thank you notes and felt tip markers! :)
Then we moved on to our SWAG give away! Jessica got a new Pencil Sharpener! I was a bit jealous! (our Jelly my 3rd graders would say!)
But we all left with our SWAG bags!!
Afterwards we ate and started getting ready to PARTAAA. We all dressed up in our 80's gear! It was a blast!
We had a blast at the French Lick Blogger Retreat! We can't wait for next year to go back and meet more people!!
