sutton034

Today was our 100th day of school!  It was a busy day and I am exhausted!  Here are few of the things we did: 100th Day Bulletin Board I saw this idea in my son's school and instantly loved it!  Our 100th day is always around Valentines day so having kids think of 100 reasons we love our school was perfect.  I cut 100 hearts out of pink paper and glued them to a piece of chart paper.  We passed it around the school and had kids and adults write reasons they love our school.  I will definitely be doing this again next year but I will be using heart shaped post-it notes because I won't have to cut anything out and they will be a bit bigger.  The hearts were a bit on the smaller size for something I wanted to make a bulletin board out of and kids could really only fit one word.   Here were a few of my favorites math, feeling of community, caring teachers, amazing students, respect, safety, creativity and honesty.  100th Day Swag The primary tea...

Coming into this school year, I knew that the thing my fourth graders struggled with most last year was fractions.  I remember chatting with the teacher they had for third grade math about their strengths and needs and fractions came up over and over again.  After reading Beyond Pizzas & Pies  and Beyond Invert and Multiply this past summer I had plenty of new ideas and lessons to try out but I still hadn't quite figured how I wanted to kick off this unit.  This class in particular has a huge span of ability levels and experiences and I wanted everyone to be able to access this first lesson without it being to easy for half the class.  I also wanted to provide them with a hands on experience using fractions in their world. I decided to have them in mixed ability groups exploring some fraction manipulatives.  I put a manipulative at each table along with a large piece of chart paper and a variety of markers.  Their task was to explore the materials...

About 6 years ago, I came up with a game to get my students up and moving around during math class. I called it Movin' It Math and made many versions on index cards. As the years have passed and beautiful clip art and desktop publishing has gotten easier, my cards have migrated to computer generated. Over the last 11 months, I have been working on getting them in a shareable format. This weekend after many hours of putting final touches on, I have released my first 4 sets . Each set includes 40 cards, directions for Movin' It Math and 10 other activities you can use these cards for. These cards are the ones I find myself using over and over again.  We have been using them everyday in K and many days at the beginning of grade 1!  I have many more versions of Movin' It Math that are sitting as files on my computer waiting for finishing touches.  This game as spanned my classes K-6.  I have cards for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, finding fractors, fra...

We are 7 weeks into the school year and gearing up for parent teacher conferences later this week.  In our school, we try to schedule all conferences on a Thursday evening or Friday morning.  This way if multiple folks need to be involved in the conference, we are all in the building at the same time. The evening hours also work much better for parents.   As the math specialist I get invited to attend the difficult conferences.  If a student is behind or in some cases very ahead of their peers, I will often be asked to join the conference.  Classroom teachers also invite me when they know parents have specific concerns or when it is a student I have a lot of contact with.  Sometimes I am asked to sit in on a conference because the parents are very difficult or have expressed opinions about their students math learning that do not show understanding of how or why we are teaching math as we do.  Depending on the reason for the conference and what the con...

The school year is in full swing in my neck of the woods and we have been hard at work doing assessments, setting up groups and even getting some teaching in!  My second graders have been looking at addition and subtraction strategies for facts to 20.  One of my top priorities for this unit is making sure kids are solid with combinations of 10 by the middle of the unit.  Without being solid with combinations of 10, some of the most efficient strategies for the facts between 10 and 20 are much more challenging for kids to develop.  We talk about the friends of 10 from the first day of the unit and incorporate games like make 10 go fish , flip and write , pyramid ,  and  popper cups .  My second graders are getting really good at these!  This morning, I was thinking they all seemed fluent but I wanted a quick way to check without another formal assessment. Today I was using One Big Pair of Underwear to introduce the difference model for subtraction...

     There is just something about back to school time that makes everything seem so fresh and new.  I love getting to know new students and seeing how much my old students have grown and changed.  We have been back in action for 3 days and I think I had forgotten how tired the first week of school makes me!  My classroom is ready, I am well on my way to establishing routines with my students and hopefully I will be back to blogging regularly!  Today I am linking up with my math blogger friends to bring you tips for getting your math class off to a great start!  I want to share with you some of the ways I set up my classroom and some of the routines I teach to help increase math talk in my classroom.   Wait Time One of the best things you can do to increase the math talk in your classroom is to be very aware of your wait time.  When you ask a question or listen to a student's response, how many seconds are you giving yourself and your st...

I have 3 more weeks of summer vacation but I have already been back in the classroom getting things ready!   When you have 3 small kids at home you have to take every second you can to stop by the classroom and get stuff done.  I have moved to a new and much larger room this year and have inherited a bunch of stuff because we are down a few classrooms this year as our enrollment has declined.  I spent a full day in the classroom last week and managed to pull together a few things.  My big accomplishment for this week was creating and assembling a great bulletin board.  I have been thinking about different board games I love and how to use them in my classroom decor.  I have always loved scrabble but have never found a way to use it in a math classroom.  One night on TPT , I stumbled upon a Scrabble font and decided to create my own math vocab bulletin board out of scrabble looking tiles.  Here it is: You can head to my TPT store and grab this set ...