Halloween Math Centers

Hi friends!  I'm here to share some math center ideas today. I hope you can use some of these in your classroom this fun/busy week! :)

 

 

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

Students roll one die and then double the number.  They color in the picture of their sum.

 

 

Spooky Shake-Up

This is an idea I originally saw on First Grader, At Last!  I just tweaked it to fit our needs.  I'm not including this in my freebies since you can get a similar egg carton cover (along with other holidays!) here in Sarah Cooley's shop!

 

 

Spider Addition

This center uses black and orange spider rings that can be found at most dollar stores.  They grab a handful of spiders and write their addition sentence.

 

October Roll, Add, and Color

This was a center that I blogged about last week.  I wanted to upload it in case anyone would like to use it!

 

Have a wonderful week!

 

 

We Heart October!

Who doesn't love October?? This is my favorite time of year!  I love the themes and crafts for this time of year.  I also love decorating the classroom -- October galore! 

Our hallway display with our owl directed drawings from The Elementary Art Room!

 

Our lunch choice chart... students come in and move their pumpkin in the morning!

 

Fall and Halloween books are out!

 

We've also been doing some fun October themed center work!  This is how I "grade" center work... we keep all work from centers and math tubs in our stay at school folder all week.  If they don't finish something during center time, they can work on it whenever they have extra time.  On Fridays, I staple their work with this center rubric on top.  It's super simple and to the point -- so it's easy to check and hand back!  I just do this while they are doing Fun Friday.  Anyone who chooses not to do their work during the week misses Fun Friday and has to do their work instead.  Usually after one time of that happening, they get their bottom in gear during center time. :)

 

This was one of our math tubs last week.  This file is on my school computer, but if you would like it, leave me a comment with your email address and I will send it to you!

 

One of our reading centers this week was my Noun or Verb Read/Write the Room center.  This was a huge hit with the little ones!  I taught them to use the sentence "I can ____" to see if the word was a verb or a noun.  They loved it.  "I can ghost?? Noo!  That's a noun!" :)

 

If you would like to download this for free -- click {HERE!}

Happy October!!

Five for Friday/Freebies!

Today, I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

 

 We've been learning about the different states of matter in science, and even after several examples and experiments, my some of my littles were still not quite grasping the concepts.  So I did what I usually do and made up a song!  We sang it daily and they each got their own copy so they could sing it at home. 

They LOVED it and they were able to better retain the information.  :)

 

 

 

Our shared reading story this week was "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds.  Don't you just love this story??  I know I do, and my first graders do too!  It's great for predicting, inferring, and especially comparing & contrasting.  It's also great for discussing how characters change.  We've been hitting those reading standards left and right this week.

I always want my students to connect to the story, so this week we completed this reader's response log.  They did such an awesome job at being creative and thinking outside the box!

 

 

 

This year, I'm doing writer's workshop very differently than I did last year (you can read about that here if you'd like!  I will make a post about how we do it now soon).  My class this year needs a lot more structure than my class last year.  This isn't a bad thing; we've just had to change up how we do a few things! :)

 

 

We finished up our "Ouch" stories this week.  They turned out great!  My little writers really put a lot of effort into writing, revising, and editing these stories.  I had parent helpers publish the stories for them. 

 

Today, we started "How-to" writing.

 

 

We began by discussing what "How-to" writing is.  The first step was thinking of some things we could do very well.  We made this "Things we ROCK at!" chart.

 

 

Then, they went back to their seat and made their own list.

 

 

We stopped there for this week.  Next week, we will start drawing and writing each step.

 

 

 

 

 Lately, my kiddos have been really impressing me during math tubs.  Working together, flying through the skills... so I decided it was time for a bit of a challenge.  One of our math tubs this week was Buggy Math: How Many Legs?  Let me tell you, this math tub definitely sharpened up some higher order thinking skills!  I got some little bugs from the dollar store and the students had to tell how many legs were on different numbers of bugs.

 I didn't get a picture of the back side, but they then had to add two bugs together before they told how many legs there were.

This little one above had written 5 bugs = 29 legs.  She realized she miscounted and said, "OH!  Because if you counted by 5s you wouldn't count 29.  It's 30!"  Wow, hello recognizing multiples of 5!

 

 

 

 

 

Last - but not least! - we've been working on our Mother's Day gifts.  They always turn out so cute.  :)  If you would be interested in this project you can click on the cover page below. 

 

Thanks for stopping by!  Have a fabulous weekend, friends!

Snow Day Productivity!

SNOWWWW DAYYY!!

There's nothing like getting a little extended break by getting an it's too cold to go anywhere or even change out of your pajamas "extreme low temperatures and dangerous road conditions" day off!

Last night and today I worked hard to finish two of my winter packs.  I can't wait to use these the next few weeks in my classroom.  Here they are!

 

To view them in my TpT store, just click on the cover page!  I will also be sharing these as I use them in my classroom in the upcoming weeks.  :)

Autumn Activities

Hello friends!  I just wanted to share some fun fall activities we've been doing the past few weeks. 

I heart glyphs!  Integrating literacy, math, science, and art all in one? A teacher's dream!  This adorable scarecrow glyph activity is by Shari Sloane and can be found here. :)

I love simple and effective math tubs and centers.  Here we were sharpening our subtraction skills.

We love SmartBoard games!  This skip counting activity can be found here.

One of our fast finisher activities this month is writing and illustrating fall words onto sentence strips.  The fall words list is from Teacher Bits and Bobs!

Another fast finisher activity -- pick a sight word pumpkin and write it on the line!  Can you tell "simple and effective" is my motto? :)

 

And here we did some torn paper handprint trees for a fun fall art project! :) I love fall!