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Thursday, May 17, 2012

End of the Year---and staying Motivated!

It's always so hard to stay motivated when it's so close to summer vacation.  I can smell the ocean water now....feel the hot sun as I'm swimming in the pool.....NOT hear the sound of the alarm going off----yes, people, I'm talking about how hard it is to keep ME motivated.....my kids are great! :)

Okay, so they too are ready for summer vacation, but today's Math Lesson went fairly quick, they understood the skill, and they stayed engaged and actively participated.  That's doing pretty good on ANY day in a first grade room, let alone with TEN DAYS LEFT!! :)

First, our skill was adding a two-digit and one-digit number together.  My students can do this with a number line, hundreds chart, or counting up.  We've had this skill before on our Math Minutes from Creative Teaching Press----I LOVE LOVE LOVE these things:
But now we are working on it in our Envisions Math as well.  Here's a picture of the lesson we were doing today.


My students love rolling dice to do our Math.  Today, we rolled 3 dice to determine our math problems.  I used two big foam dice (from the Dollar Store), both a different color.

The blue die represented our tens place and the white die represented our ones place.  After we determined our two digit number and recorded it on our paper, we rolled a smaller foam die.

This die represented our other addend.  To give more discussion for possible regrouping, I said that we'd just automatically add two to whatever number was rolled on the little die (perhaps blank dice with other numbers would be better--hindsight---I was teaching on a spur-of-the-moment like we do so many times). 

We then showed our two-digit number using tens and ones, and added on our second addend.  *You can see better in the the top picture that these are on my white board*

We figured out our math problems by trading in ten cubes for a tower if needed, and regrouped as necessary.  My class was better today with this math lesson than they had been all week.  

We use dice a lot for our math, but I guess I hadn't had them out for a while.  I think it made a difference today. 

Ohh, and for the tens and ones----stack a tower together (a ten) and stick a big piece of magnetic tape on the back.



For your ones cube, just a small piece of magnetic tape on the back is enough to keep it on the board.  This would also be a good way to use manipulatives for centers too.  


1 comment:

  1. What a great idea for showing examples on the board!!

    Jessica Stanford
    mrsstanfordsclass.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

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