Operation Elf - My S-ELF-less Act

It's just a few days before we sit down to our Thanksgiving dinner, but Krista Wallden has issued a challenge - and I loved it! A very generous person herself, she's giving away a set of clip art and challenged store owners to create a giveaway for their store. My kiddos are in the middle of working on fractions right now, so I jumped at the chance to create a math center/whole group activity/classroom decoration. Thus, Equivalent Fraction Garland was born!

My Vision: I'll print these off and get them laminated next week. Students will work in groups during our next center rotation to line up all of the fractions on a giant number line. (Preferably a piece of painter's tape on the floor.) Once they have their solution, they'll copy it onto a worksheet and hang on to it until everyone has had a chance to visit the station.

As a class, we'll discuss our results and come to a single conclusion.

Finally, I'll hang the tags off of the whiteboard tray to decorate our room. I'm thinking that a little bit of gold garland will spruce up the bare background.

Pictures to come later...

Math Ladders - 4.NBT.5 (Multiplication)

Need your students to practice 4.NBT.5? Math ladders for multiplication are here! My students have spent the last two weeks solving math problems and are getting pretty good at this benchmark.

Speedy Sally - Another use for task cards!

My last post focused on having students create an answer key or check one for you. This week, I came up with a great idea for my task card sets (that can be done with ANY set of task cards).

Speedy Sally (or Speedy Sam, Too Fast Fred, Rushed Ralph, etc. - name you DON'T have in your room this year!) has already complete the task card set you want students to work on. The problem is, they - like many of our kids - rushed and made many, many mistakes. The kids work to solve each task card and then "check" Sally's work. I had my kids give her a check by problems that were right and a big, 'ole red X by problems that are wrong. Of course, problems that are wrong need to have the correct answer written beside it so she can learn from her mistake. :)

To create this, I grabbed a blank answer sheet, wrote in about half of the problems correctly. Then, I flipped through the task cards and wrote in answers that were close or had common mistakes.

Centers...without Answer Keys (or even a WRONG key!)

So, this year my district has adopted Florida's version of Common Core, but NO textbook. Ack! I've been working like crazy every night to put together an interactive notebook (thank goodness for Blair Turner!) and figure out which pieces to use with my students. Well, that left very little time for center prep - not that we've really had time for centers!

Enter this week...a breath of fresh air.... My students are picking up the cut & paste system, so we're able to complete our notebooks much more quickly. They even seem to be doing fairly well with the content. So, I needed something for my kids to work on to review. The thing is, I knew exactly what I wanted them to do...I just hadn't yet created it!

Last night I stayed up until nearly midnight creating Math Ladders based on 3-digits & 4-digits x 1-digit numbers. They're not available in my stores because...well...they haven't been checked yet. Today in class, my kiddos checked the answer keys for me. They were so excited to find an error (we found 2 mistakes out of 20 ladders - not TOO bad considering these were made so late at night) that they didn't realize they were doing hard work.

And then I used the same trick on some task cards. The two sets of cards were created late one night...and don't have an answer key yet. As students solved a problem, they wrote their answer (in pencil!) on a class key. The next person who solved that problem compared their answer to the one on the key. If it matched, they went on to another problem. If it didn't match, they reworked the problem. If they still weren't sure, they called in a friend to help them rework the problem. If the answer on the key was wrong, they then fixed it. It was an excellent activity and has made me seriously reconsider giving kids keys at all....

4.NBT.1 - Place Value & Power

Whew! This week has been crazy. My kiddos have been hard at work learning about how a digit's place affects its value. I think in our minds we, as adults, know that the 3 in the tens place is worth 10 times as much as a 3 in the ones place, but getting my fourth graders to understand this has been grueling! Thanks to a couple of WONDERFUL resources (mainly Blair Turner's Interactive Notebook) my students finally got the idea!

My school uses a great website - www.MobyMax.com - free to teachers for a basic account. I assigned my kids this benchmark for homework and was able to check their progress around 10 pm (when I knew their homework should be done and they should be in bed). I saw that they were struggling with multiplying by 10 or 100 and multiples of 10 and 100. So, before we even made it to class the next day I had a set of task cards created, printed, and waiting for them. I've spent the weekend tweaking & adding to the set to add to my little store. Enjoy!

Mystery Science Lab - A Little Off Topic from My Usual Math Posts...

Ten years! Today marks the tenth year I've held Mystery Science in my classroom. I look forward to this activity every year and I talk it up at our Meet the Teacher & the first day of school. The kids came into school today READY for our first science lab.

The kids love the labs because they're a bunch of mini-exploration activities that require them to use four of their senses (no tasting!) to describe the world around them. Some have right answers and some are completely open. I love the labs because they really let me see the kids in action for the first time each year. Who works well with who? Who tends to isolate him/herself from the others? Is the "new kid" making friends? Can the class follow directions and do they know how to handle lab materials?

A couple of things I  noticed today - they respected the "keep the lab volume at a manageable volume" rule! Yes! Let's celebrate! I love doing science labs, but I dread them if I have kids/groups that feel they have to talk over each other. And, even better, my kiddos really respected the lab materials. I've got some things in our lab that are quite old - like the birds' nest my mom found back when I was in college (yep, that makes it older than my fourth graders). They used their hands to very gently touch it - exactly as I asked them to. :D

Need a beginning of the year lab for your kids? Download the preview file and grab 3 of the stations for free - as well as the list of materials for the full lab.

Math Ladders

I'm so excited to release this post today! I've been working on a center activity for the last couple of months with my students and, after going through several changes to work out finer details for keeping these things numbered in an organized manner, the first few sets are ready to be released! I'm calling them Math Ladders. Basically, students work independently (or with a partner) at a center. They're given a baggie of strips that have problems on them. They find the START piece, solve the problem on the right side, and find the corresponding answer on another piece's left side. Laying the second piece above the first one on the game board, they solve the new problem. And so on, and so forth, until they reach the top. My kids loved it those last few days of school and didn't even mind doing long division the week before school let out!

What's really great about these - at least what I intend to use them for next year - is that each center has multiple sets and they build on one another. So, differentiated curriculum is a breeze. I just have to print enough sets and then hand each child the set they need to work on depending on their individual skill level.

I have a bunch of different ideas up my sleeve, but for now check out two freebies (basic facts for addition & division) and a couple of long division sets. Each file contains at least 8 different sets which could turn into 8 centers. A table of contents/skill list is on each product page and part of the file.