Halloween Math Games

Halloween is a special day in elementary school.  Between lots of costumes, our school wide dance party to Thriller, and the looming five day (yes, 5 day) weekend for students, there wasn't a lot of focusing on work from my students.

Instead of fighting for their focus, I did math games.  They were aligned to the standards and students were working on math, but in a fun way.  

Game 1: Decimal Place Value Spooky Sort, created by Jennifer Findley

We have been working on rounding and decimals, so this was perfect for them to round to the specified place value!

Game 2: Adding and Subtracting Decimals, created by Jane Feener

This was perfect for my students!  I'd just explicitly taught adding and subtracting the week before so it was a great spiral review.

Game 3: Sweet Rounding Decimals, created by Fun in Fifth Grade

Again, another awesome center to review math concepts!

Oh, did I mention all these fabulous games were free?  Be sure to leave their creators some love on TpT!

Math training, days 2 & 3

After tackling my homework for math training, grocery shopping, and spending several hours leveling my library (such a daunting task), I didn't have the energy left to process what I'd learned.  

However, today I was home much earlier so I could reflect on yesterday and today's math trainings.

Days 2 & 3:

We talked about multiplication.  We talked about it...a lot.  Perhaps it's because I teach fifth grade and have taught inclusion, but none of the strategies mentioned were new information.  I grasped the concept right away and helped my neighbor make the same mathematical discoveries.

However, I did learn a few new things over the past few days.  Here are my "ah ha" moments:

The minuend is the first number in a subtraction problem and represents the amount you start with.  The subtrahend is the amount that is being removed or subtracted.  

This discovery raised an interesting question within our group.  Why is it that other math vocabulary terms (addend, sum, factor, product, quotient, etc) are well-known but minuend and subtrahend aren't?  Why can teachers (and hopefully their students) use the correct vocabulary for the other operations, but stumble on subtraction terms?  I know I'll be incorporating these terms into my math instruction!

"Give One, get one, move on" strategy

The page is divided into four sections.  Students solve the problem in the first quadrant, which is labeled "give".  After time to process the problem, students then will stand up and find three other people to "get" strategies from.  The students will work in pairs to explain their strategies to one another.  Not only does this allow for movement, but students can explain their thoughts to one another.  During this time, the teacher is monitoring as an informal assessment to see what students are grasping the content and which ones still need a little more practice time.

The next classroom tweak deals with these manipulatives:

Found in almost every elementary classroom, I always called these "ones", "tens", "hundreds" and so on.  Most teachers do.

However, in doing so, you're limiting students' understanding of the relationship (powers of ten) between the manipulatives.  

These will henceforth be referred at as units (smallest), rods (long ones), flats, and cubes.

By doing so, a teacher is able to stress the relationship between a value being ten times larger or smaller than the value next to it on a place value chart.  

Referring to these as units, rods, flats, and cubes also allows for the manipulation in upper elementary.  If my "one" is now the cube, I can use these manipulatives to represent a tenth (flat), a hundredth (rod), and thousandth (unit).  I can also regard the unit as a thousand, then have students prove the other values. (Rod would be 10,000, flat 100,000, cube 1,000,000).  

Finally, we played close to 100 (from Investigations).  While this game was not new to me, I did appreciate the discussion about its importance in the classroom.  In playing this math game (and others), students are provided the opportunity to practice many math skills such as estimation, reasoning, critiquing the reasoning of others, operations, and place value.  These games take minutes to learn, can be a good task for students if they finish early with an activity, and can be used as homework.  I know my students would much rather go home and play a math game as their homework then fill out a worksheet.  

Close to 100 also reminded me of another quick math activity:

What an easy way to get their brains working during the first few moments of the day!

Stay tuned for a recap of days 4 and 5!

AM reward

In our SWAG competition between AM and PM, the AM has won again.  This time, they had a half hour of free board game time.  The timing worked out perfectly because we lost twenty minutes of our hour to an assembly, so after fluency there was only time to meet with one group (and cover everything we needed to).

Reward snapshots:

Many of my games were generously funded by friends, family, and strangers on donors choose.  Thank you again for continued support in my classroom!

(The Series of Unfortunate Events board game was perhaps my favorite find ever! I found it at Bookman's, a used bookstore in Arizona.  I didn't even know it existed until one magical spring break!)

I love watching them get so excited about comprehension and reading games!

Book-opoly

Supplies: 
Card stock
A large game board or piece of cardboard
markers
Monopoly pieces

I found this image on flickr:

And I want to make it!  But more importantly, I'd want my students to help make it.  I could have each group find the "golden line" or best quote from the book for the description.  They could vote on the books to determine placement on the board. 

How fun!

(I think the meaningful discussion would come from the analysis of quotes and determining the placement of the books.  They could justify their thinking as a written response, stating why that book has earned that placement).

Or...

I just determined my end of the year bulletin board!  Done!

Happy reading :)

Math Anchor Charts and Ideas

I love great math ideas.

Here's an easy center to make, it just requires sharpies, a plastic bag, some patience and old water bottle lids (yay upcycling!)

This center can easily be differentiated for any grade level depending on the operations that are used.  For fifth grade, I would use parentheses and all operations signs.  This would be great for making algebraic expressions, practicing multiplication and division, finding unknown values and using decimals to show place value.

Students could easily bring in lids to help you collect the supplies.

With the Common Core, fifth graders have to review geometric shapes and classify them into a hierarchy.  This is a great example of an anchor chart that could help students:

Before we go into 3D shapes, I would review 2D shapes on the geoboard.  Most classes have a set of the old plastic boards and rubber bands, but there is a great free app on the iPad that allows students to virtually manipulate geoboards.  As a bonus, you can expand the board from the traditional 5x5 to a much larger 10x10 board, allowing for more room to make shapes.  This app could be used as a formative assessment where you call out a shape (ex, right scalene triangle) and students make one to show you.  

Plus, there are different colored rubber band options with the app :)

This is a great freebie I found on another teacher's blog:

I've used it in my classroom and it's a great center to review number sense.

You can also use cups to review place value:

For a review of area and perimeter, you can use graph paper, markers and dice for this easy game of war.

Students roll the dice, then create the corresponding array.  Students must strategically place their array on the grid and try to stump their partner.  I like that this is a nice model of how repeated addition and multiplication are the same.

This can easily be differentiated for lower grades by having students add the dice rather than multiply them. 

This is another great (priced) TpT center that my students enjoy:

Plus, it's pink and polka-dotted!  Grab yours here for a buck! 

Happy math time!