Some Summer Organization

It has been WAY too long!  It has been great to have summer to relax and rejuvenate.  The highlight of the summer was definitely getting engaged to my best friend!  The big day is in December!  Now that I am headed back to work in a few days my mind is on school and I thought I would share a couple organizational ideas from this summer.

My hundreds, tens, and ones blocks used to be in a huge bucket and I would divvy them out each time we needed to use them in math.  In second grade we use these often (addition, subtraction, place value, double and triple digit addition and subtraction) and I decided that I wanted an easier way to pass these out.  Tupperware containers proved to be my perfect solution.  Now I will be able to easily pass out the Tupperware containers when we need to use the hundreds, tens, and ones blocks.  Not only that, but the students will be able to put pack them up and put them away easily. 

My students have pencil boxes in their desks with the things we use on a daily basis, including crayons for when they need to color.  For some projects however colored pencils are better and the students get excited about using markers every once in a while.  Since we don't use colored pencils and markers every day (or even close to every day), I created a basket with colored pencils and pencil sharpeners and a cup with markers for each table group.  When we need colored pencils or markers someone from each table group will be able to go get them (I like having in the cubbies pictured above because the kids can reach them and therefore get them and put them away).

Those are a couple of my organization projects from this summer.  It is nice to be teaching second grade for the fourth year! I can focus a little more on organization and other things that may help the year to run a little more smoothly. 

Good luck to all you teachers out there with the beginning of your school years!

Egg Hunt Review

This is going to be a "Throw Back Thursday" post.  I didn't blog nearly as much as I would have liked to this past year.  I had a great group of kids and it was a really good year.  I was sad to see them leave at the en of the year, but look forward to their smiling faces in the hallways as third graders after a well deserved summer break!  I am excited that I have some time to relax, rejuvenate, get some projects done for the classroom, and do some blogging. 

Towards the end of the school year I am always looking for fun games and ways to review math.  I have posted about some of them in the past.  This year I got some plastic eggs and put a math problem in each one.  I numbered the eggs and then hid them around the room while the kids were at prep. 

When they came in they each got a recording sheet with 23 numbered, blank boxes on it (similar to the recording sheet that you would use for the game "scoot" if you are familiar with that).  I then explained the rules that students had to find each of the eggs and put the answer to the question in the corresponding box.  There was also a rule that there was not to be more than one person at an egg at a time and the eggs needed to be put back right where they were found. 

The kids were completely engaged and had a great time with the review.  I love when I can let them be a little more active while still being engaged in learning or in this case reviewing. 

While I did this at the end of the year, it could also work as a review for a single unit in math or be adapted and used as an activity to practice a literacy skill.

It's feels good to be blogging again, hopefully I can keep it up through the summer and do a little next year too!

 

If you would like a copy of the review questions I used, you can find them here.  Happy hunting!

 

 

 

 

Summer Projects!

One thing I love about summer is that I have so much time to work on projects for my classroom!  It seems that when school gets out I have this sudden energy and excitement and I am able to get a lot done.  I have to run with it while t lasts, because I know that it won't last all summer.  School has been out for a week and a half now.  Here is what I have accomplished:

- I moved my classroom (I am moving to a room that is bigger).  I organized everything as I went so everything in my new room is super organized which is great!  I even labeled cupboards and drawers so I can stay organized throughout the year.  I also got rid of stuff that I haven't been using or that had been thrashed by the kids.

- I made a homework binder that the kids will sing each week if they have not done their homework.  It is organized by week (we have 30 weeks worth of homework packets).  This will be an easy way for me to notice who is not turning in homework and allow me to contact home. I also have plastic sleeves in the back so that I can keep a black line of each weeks homework in the binder so that it is easy to make additional copies if needed.

- I updated my "teacher binder" I created a few new forms for it and put it in a new binder.  My one from last year was completely falling apart.  To read about what I have in my teacher binder click here. 

- I created my sharp and dull pencil jars.  Due to the fact that my kids always break my pencil sharpeners (without fail), I will be the only one sharpening pencils next year.  They can put their dull ones in and take a sharp one and then at the end of the day I will sharpen all the pencils that need to be sharpened. I got the ins for 1.00 each at target : )

 I created class journals!  I plan on using these as fast finishers.  When students are done with assigned work they can respond in one of the class journals.  Each journal has a prompt on the front and some ideas of what types of things to include in the journal entry.  Student can latter go back and see how their classmates responses to the journals.  I got this great idea here. 

If you are interested in using my prompts you can download them here.

- I made my math Guess That Number game using an old Guess Who game.  Read about it here.

- I made a jar for Box Tops using an old Ragu jar

- I made some new signs to go by our calendar.  These ill be laminated so that the kids can write on them each morning as we do calendar. 

- I made up some "Fast Finisher" signs that I can put up on the boars (a few at a time) so that students know what their options are should they finish early with an assignment.  I got this great idea here.

- I made some glitter clips to use to hang up "World Class Work" in my classroom.  These were super easy an I love how they look! Got the idea here. I made 12 of them : )

- I cut scraps of old t-shirts for my students to use as whiteboard erasers.  I made a T-shirt quilt last summer and saved the scraps so that Icould use them for this very reason.  I still have a ton of t-shirt scraps left.  It will last me for years to come : )

- I printed out these keyboards that I found here for my students to practice typing their spelling words on for word work. 

- I also came up with a book report form and a missing poster that students can choose to fill out as a fast finisher.  I used a lot if ideas from here free download of a book report.

- I made a reading bingo board to hand out to parents in the fall, you can read about it here.

- I made some question cubes for Guided Reading.  Different colors are for different reading levels.  I got the foam dice in a 2-pack at the dollar store.  They will be great because they will not be loud on my guided reading table and will therefore not distract my class : )

I have also managed to hang out with friends, go to the movies, exercise, make a scrapbook of all my love notes from my kids this past year, go on a camp-out, blog a bit, go to the pool, eat my first snow cone of the season, and find a place to live next year!  Next project here I come!

Guess That Number

It is summer break and therefore project time!  I love having time in the summer to get ready for the new school year.  My to-do list right now has about 50 things on it.  We will see how many I get through. 

I have seen people revamp Guess Who games to be faces of presidents or other people.  I got a Guess Who game from my mom.  There were a couple of faces missing, so I decided that I would revamp it and make it into a math game for my kids.  It will be great for practicing place value and for practicing using the terminology "odd", "even", "less than", and "greater than".  I'm sure that it will quickly become a favorite math fast finisher activity.

Here are some pictures:

After I printed out the numbers I mounted them on card stock to make them more durable and to make them look good from the back.  This will also keep the two sets of numbers separate should they be taken out for any reason. 

I printed 3 sets of the same numbers.  I used one set for each board and the other set as the cards to draw from.  The numbers in blue are odd and the numbers in black are even to help my lower kids be successful. 

I also made a sheet with the different questions students could ask.  This will help them to use the proper terminology as they play.

Here are the questions:

Is your number odd?

Is your number even?

Is your number greater than ____?

Is your number less than _____?

Is the number in the tens place greater than ____?

Is the number in the tens place less than ____?

Is the number in the ones place greater than____?

Is the number in the ones place less than____?

Does your number have a ____ in the tens place?

Does your number have a ____ in the ones place?

Is your number ____?

Let me know what you think!

 

You can grab a free download of the questions and numbers here.

Geometry Matching Game

Click HERE to get a free copy. Print, cut, and play! Enjoy!

Odd and Even House

We just got through talking about odd and even numbers.  One of the activities that I did with the students toward the end of our unit was an Odd and Even House.

I had the students draw a house.  I told them hat they could put as many doors, window, chimneys, etc as they wanted.  I also encouraged them to put trees in the yard and pets and other details.  After the students were done with their house they had to turn their paper over and list how many of everything and whether the number was odd or even.  They loved it, it was a fun little review that integrate some art : )

Here are a few examples:

Fact Family Street and Game

We have been working with fact families this week.  Today we made a fact family street!  The kids were really excited about it.  I gave them each their roof first and ad them come up with a fact family and write one number in each corner of the house.  They had to show it to me (so I could check that their numbers were actually a fact family) before I let them pick their color for their house.  They then had to write the two addition sentences and two subtraction sentences for the fact family.  After which they glued it all together and came and put their house on our fact family street.  The yellow lines started to get a little crooked at the end of the street because my kiddos wanted to help put them on.  They were very excited about their street!  I know that this has been done by others before.  Thank you to whoever came up with the brilliant idea in the first place!

We also played a fact family game today!

Get the students into groups of 4 or 5.  Each group needs a whiteboard and a marker.  Give the students a fact family.  The first person writes the fact family, the second person writes one of the addition sentences, the third person writes the other addition sentence, the fourth person writes one of the subtraction sentences and the final person writes the last subtraction sentence.  Which ever group finishes first and has every member raising their hand wins the round!  My kids had a blast with this, try it out!

Make your own class hundreds chart!

This is something that I did with my class at the beginning of the school year.  I plan on doing it again this year, I thought I would share.

First, I got out my huge hundreds chart! See THIS post for more on the hundreds chart. 

We talked about what it looked like and what it could be.  I asked them if it could be a hundreds chart and if it was a hundreds chart where would 1 be?  They helped me number it.  We wrote on it with a dry erase.  I had kids go and stand on different numbers so that we could notice patterns (e.g. if you add 10 you will end up directly below the number you started at.)  After we had explored the hundreds chart and numbers a little bit I gave each student some squares and assigned them numbers to write.  We then put them all together to make our very own hundreds chart that was up in our classroom all year!

Free Emergency Sub Plans

A while back I saw the idea of emergency sub plans that revolve around a book and LOVED it!  This past year the sick days I had to get subs for were due to pink eye (which my students so kindly gave me) and laryngitis, both for which I had no problem writing sub plans.  Although I hope that I will be healthy and never have to use emergency sub plans I figure I would rather be safe than sorry and someday I may be extremely thankful to myself. 

I went to Barnes and Noble and found these great book! They were $6.00 a piece, and since I couldn't decide which one I liked better, I bought both : )

Using the stories in the book I came up with activities for reading, writing, math, and science.  I also came up with a list of extra activities just in case there is time to kill.  There is more than enough for one day!  The possibilities are endless with these books, but this is what I came up with for now.  Here are the EMERGENCY SUB PLANS

I hope that these will come in handy for someone! Let me know what you think!

Money Dice!

A while back I saw a worksheet where students were supposed to cut out dice (that had a different set of coins on each face) and then tape them together and use them for an activity.  Seeing the worksheet sparked an idea and this is what came of it!

I started with 3 wooden cubes (99 cents each at Hobby Lobby)

painted them three different colors

added coins to each side with Mod Podge

And Wala!  Money Dice!

Students can roll 1, 2, or 3 and add the coins.  I made it so that no side had more than 50 cents, that way if two dice are being used the sum of the coins would not equal more than a dollar.  Students could use these alone or with a partner (and race to see who could add the coins the fastest).  You could also play a game as a whole class and have two teams stand in single file lines.  The people at the front of each line would receive a die and roll it.  Whichever person could add the coins from the dice the quickest would get a point for their team. 

I'm excited for my kids to use these new money dice next year! These could also make a great gift for a teacher : )

Math Match-up!

I saw THIS idea on pinterest and changed it a little bit to create this math center! I'm loving math centers for the end of the year! A lot of them will make great fast finisher ativites for students next year as well! Have a great weekend! Katrina

Money Memory Game

The year is coming to an end. Math testing is over, but math must go on! You can never get too much practice, so for math tomorrow we are going to do math centers with games and activities to reinforce some of the basic math concepts we have worked with this year! My students are going to love it! I thought it would be fun to have a money memory game, and couldn't find one easily so click here! I made one and am sharing it with you! Have a great week!

Math Facts Race!

Spring Break is a fabulous thing! I hope that everyone either had or is having a wonderful break!

My team and I have found that this group of second graders are very competitive! I came up with this game (using water bottle caps of course) that my competitive kids will love! Students will use a timer, they will set the timer for one minute or two minutes and see how many math facts they can find and record during that time. They can race against a friend or just race against themselves trying to get more math facts in a smaller amount of time. They can do addition or subtraction! Another way to do it would be to use a stopwatch and have students see how long it takes them to come up with the 30 facts and then see if they can beat their own score over time. This would work great as a fast finisher for high students or as extra math practice for those students who struggle. All the students in between will love it too!

I made up the addition and subtraction recording forms. They can be found here : )

Multiplication Monsters!

There was no school today because our term ended yesterday! I ended up going into work for a lot of the day just to get caught up a little and to prepare for next week. It was nice to have a day to just get some things done. I did some lesson planning and thought I would share a multiplication idea with you!

We are starting some basic multiplication concepts in math this next week. After looking through a PowerPoint and practicing seeing "groups of",and understanding how multiplication works a little bit we will do this activity to go along with the saying "I see how multiplication works!". We're making multiplication monsters! Each student will get three monsters with no eyes. Student will have to decide how many eyes to put on their monsters. They must put the same number on each monster (equal groups). After putting the eyes on they will fill in a paper to help them understand the different ways we can look at multiplication.

Here is a picture of what a final product will look like:



If you want to use this activity you can download the monster here and the writting portion here

You can extend the activity by having students tell you the repeated addition problem or multipliction problem for how many horns,tails, spots etc. there are!

Have fun!

Katrina

Hundredth Day!

O.K. so the hundredth day of school is coming up in about a week and a half. Usually I put my holiday ideas up after I have already done them. I haven't figured out everything that I will be doing for the hundredth day of school yet, but I do have a few ideas so I will put them up in advance : )

O.k. so one idea that I found on pinterest is that you give the students a hundreds chart and a dice. Have them estimate how many dice rolls it will take them to fill the hundreds chart. If they roll a 6 they fill in the first six squares. if they rolled a four next they would fill in the next four squares with a different color so that at the end they can count how many rolls it actually took.

In math we are talking about money! A fun money activity would be to have students in groups and have them find as many different ways as they can to make a dollar (since a dollar is 100 cents). The team with the most ways could get some type of prize.

Writing:
I am so excited for our hundredth day writing activity. We are actually going to start on this next week so that they can be finished and displayed by the 100th day of school. Students are going to write to the prompt: If I lived to be 100 years old I would... The first day we will just read a book or two, talk about older people and then brainstorm our ideas about what we would do, have, feel, want etc. if we lived to be 100 years old. We will put this information on a web. When the webs are finished we will begin writing our stories. We are going to do a fun art piece to go with our writing. We are going to make ourselves at age 100! Don't you love the torn paper for the wrinkly face? Well I do too...and I love pinterest because once again that is where I found this idea!

Here is my example of the art piece to show my kids:



I'm sure there may be other ideas, but they are not coming to me at the moment.

Loving this rainy Saturday!

Human Hundreds Chart

I actually made this over the summer, but am just now putting the idea up. One of my professors showed us this idea and I had to make one. It is a life size hundreds chart that the students can walk on. I used it to review the hundreds chart at the beginning of the year. I used it when we talked about skip counting and when we did graphing to make human graphs! Love this thing!



All you need is clear picnic table covering, clear packing tape (to piece the plastic together to make it a perfect square), and blue painters tape : ) So easy and the students LOVE using it!