100th day of school

Last Thursday we celebrated the 100th day of school. This school year has gone by so fast! I cannot believe that we only have about three and a half months left. I got a lot of cute 100th day of school ideas from Pinterest. I put a banner outside my classroom that said "You are 100 days smarter." My kids loved walking under it when we left our classroom during the day.

During our math block, we did some estimation. We visited three classrooms in our pod. Each classroom had a jar outside their door. The jars had different objects in them and the students had to estimate how many were in the jar. They had to decide if it was more or less than 100. We used a recording sheet that I had gotten from someone's blog. The students loved seeing how close they got with their estimations.

At the end of our day we did some art work. The students drew what that thought they would look like when they were 100 years old. I pulled up a picture of a 100 year old man who lives in Africa. The kids used this picture to look at when they were drawing themselves at 100. We did a little comparing and contrasting between us and the 100 year old man. When the students were done, I made a class book of the drawings and hung them outdside we everyone to look at. Here are a few pictures from the 100th day of school:

The banner outside our classroom.

We made it 100 days with our sweet students!

Happy 100th Day of School!



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.



Tacky the Penguin

This week at APS we do not have a reading story. In our classroom this week we are reading about Tacky the Penguin. This morning we started off with a quick Powerpoint I created to help us review and then we did a prediction sheet with a partner to predict what we thought the story would be about. The kids loved getting to read and listen to a different type of story. I found a cute little video of someone reading the story on youtube. I just typed in Tacky the Penguin and it is the first video. My kids have been saying, "Whats happening" all day! This afternoon we created our own Tacky the Penguin and they turned out very cute. Here are a few pictures from our wild and crazy Monday:

How cute did our "Tacky the Penguin" turn out?

We compared Tacky and the other penguins

Our Tacky Prediction sheets. I found this whole unit on TPT for free and I am not sure who put it on there though.....

Here is the Powerpoint I used this Morning for Tacky the Penguin:

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AdvYr0O9g5hUZGhjazljYnJfMGhnbXdwcWY5

Getting back into the swing of things...

Today is a Teacher work day at school so I have a lot of time today to get things ready for tomorrow. I came up to school last week and worked in my classroom so today I can focus on math centers and my small groups. It is a little dorky to say that I was excited to come back to school today to see all my teacher friends... I was creating a few math centers and I wanted to share a simple one with you guys. I saw the idea on pinterest, it is not mine and I am sure most of you have used this before. I did create a sheet to go with it. All you do is take a deck of playing cards and take the Jacks, Queens, Aces, and Kings out and all you should have left are number cards. This week we are reviewing 2 digit addition, so to get my students back into the swing of things we are going to review using playing cards. I put my centers in a gallon zip lock bag.  Here are the directions and the answer sheet for the card math centers.  Happy Monday!!


Click here to get the direction and answer sheet!!!!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dHllAnZMqJLwC8mQYQ0RJBwlijS2x12ajL8dHDg544E/edit