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Sunday, February 21, 2016

Telling Time with NO Worksheets!

This week our big skill was telling time to 5 minutes!

What fun!

We started by talking about all the reasons that telling time is an important skill.  They came up with some great ideas and some funny stories!

Here is my favorites:
"My mommy is always late and it makes her have a war with daddy!"
"So we don't miss Sponge Bob!"  quickly interrupted by a friend, "Or miss school!"

To get us started with telling time we talked about all of the parts of the clock and we became the HUMAN CLOCK!  This is one of my favorite lessons each year.  Such a favorite that my Teaching BBF and her class joined us for the fun.

You put the kids in a big circle and have 12 kids be the numbers on the clock.  Two students are the hands.  You practice positioning the the kids at different spots and have the extra kids, the ones standing on chairs, try to tell the time.  It is a lot of fun and the kids catch on instantly!

Here is a little picture to make it easier to understand.  I hated to "blob" out the kids faces because their expressions are the best part of this activity.  Lots of little fingers skip counting from number to number.....  teacher happiness!


Once we got the hang of it we and practiced, practiced, practiced!

This lesson takes a tiny bit of prep on the front end.  Just running and laminating the signs and hands.

This activity has leveled writing prompts to use at the end of the lesson.  I have some kiddos that wanted to know about time to the minute, so I explained it to them and they totally got it!  SCORE ONE FOR ME!


The other thing I do to help us learn telling time is a simple game.  Set your phone alarm clock or download a ringer app to go off randomly during the day.  Whenever it goes off the first hand in the air gets to tell the time.  If they are right, FANTASTIC and they clip up.  If they are wrong, I try someone else.  The kids LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it!  This game is a great quick break during the day and after it is over they get refocused real fast.  I highly recommend trying it!  Your kiddos will be time telling like pros within a few weeks!

Teaching is hard work and every now and then we must treat ourselves!  Here is my BIG happy that I treated myself to this weekend.  Yes, it is hidden in the back of my car....  He won't ever look.... RIGHT?

Is there anything better????   I'm in heaven!



I hope everyone has a great week!

Happy Teaching!

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Fractions!

We had the best time learning about fractions this week!

We started off by using the FRACTION FAMILY!   Each member of the family is a different fraction and we had a BLAST reading about them, coloring them, and practicing saying them.  Yes, saying them was a challenge for a few friends.  When we tied saying them to ordinal positions in line it really helped them make the connection.


I try really hard not to make a ton of copies and have found that tracing things for fractions is so much more fun.  We traced paper cups and wooden blocks to get our shapes on the paper.  We partitioned each shape into the right number of equal pieces and then shaded them to make different fractions.


We wrapped up our fraction unit with some fun stations on Friday.  The kids built fractions with Lego blocks, drew pictures of fractions, wrote about what a fraction is and our most favorite station was identifying the fractions in a package of M&Ms.   I was completely shocked at how easy the kids were able to apply a large denominator to the activity.  Never under estimate their ability to do something!



As sad as it is to say it, state testing is coming.  My class will be taking the SAT10 again this year.  We started doing a little bit of reviewing this week.  I would rather do a little each week.  We struggle with multi-meaning words every single year.  It isn't that they don't know the meanings.  The problem is that they don't take the time to read and THINK!  So I made this multi-meaning task card set. We love SCOOT, so I'm planning on having a little contest to see how many of us can get all the right answers.

I purposely set up the answers a little bit differently so they have to THINK!



I am very lucky to have a fantastic color printer at home, but I know that printing in color isn't an option for everyone.  This packet has both color and black/white task cards in it.  

My plan for this set is to play SCOOT with all the kids.  If anyone struggles, I am going to put this is a center for them to practice and then let them redo it.

I hope everyone has a GREAT WEEK!

Remember that we are all making a difference....  ONE KID AT A TIME!

Happy Teaching!