What we have been up to

It has been serveral weeks since I have had time to post and share with you guys some of the things that are happening in room 216. We have been in the DIBELS cloud. Now that is over and my kids did pretty well. I do have a lot of work to do these last three and a half months, though. For about two weeks now we have been reviewing two-digit addition and subtracting with regrouping. I have had a few days where I wanted to pull my hair out. I had a few students who were having a hard time; but now that we have reviewed for two straight weeks, they have finally picked up the skill.

The easiest way I found to teach regrouping was to start with the basics. I gave each student a cup with base ten blocks in it (see picture below). There were 25 blocks in each cup. I gave them simple math problems and they had to use the blocks to solve them. When they came to the problem of taking a bigger number from a smaller number, they started to understand the concept.

I also used a little song to teach them. The song mainly talked  about if the BIG is on the BOTTOM we BORROW 10. It is to the tune of "If your Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands".  My kids loved it and it actually helped them during independent work. I will post a picture of my song if you would like to use it. I found it on the internet, so you can also google it.  We are about to move on to fractions. I can't  wait. I have seen many cute ideas on Pinterest. 

Today at our Data meeting, our sweet reading coach made us "fry phrases" and put them in actual Mcdonald's fry boxes. I am going to start using these phrases during my tier II reading intervention. Over the past few weeks I have noticed my kids not pausing at puncuation while reading. We are going back to phrasing to help with this issue.

Ok so you are now up to date... Here are some pictures from our classroom:

Math cups with the base ten blocks. These really helped when we were regrouping.

Fry Phrases. I can't wait to use these druing intervention with my students.

Roll tide from Mrs. Wilson's Class. National Champs!!!

Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Busha cheering for the Tide.