Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road: place value

Some days are just good. Today was one of those days for me.

I started off the morning by getting some free fonts from Marcia at Learning in Bliss. By being one of the first to comment on her post. I have a ~~slight~~ major obsession with fonts so I'm always on the look out for something new.

Then as the day wore on, I decided to finally be productive with lesson planning and graduate class work. I haven't been in school since Wednesday due to snow. Well, I just happened to keep blogger up in the background and caught a post just in time to win a product from Kristin at Haute Off the Printer. I chose this adorable cursive alphabet printable. I cannot wait to put it up in my room! If you need a copy for your room too, you can purchase one here!

Later Jivey had a wonderful freebie, that you can get too through tonight only (click on the picture to go to the download)! A 4th grade math reference. Love! My kiddos need all the review materials they can get, and this reference is simple and easy to read.

Exciting things with the blog are coming soon. A new design is in the works with Megan. I seriously cannot wait to work with a fellow blogger who has a Kansas connection. I cannot wait till my blog is beautified!

Finally, my place value centers are finally done! These bad boys are the reason I had to crunch this afternoon on classwork and planning, but they are worth it. My pullout math class continues to struggle with concepts if they aren't constantly reviewed. So I'm adding some place value centers to the rotation. These 6 centers are aligned to the 4th grade Common Core, as this is the level where my students are working at. This is not a full unit or lesson plans, but rather a set of centers to review concepts.

Since today has been so great, and I got official word of ANOTHER snow day tomorrow as I'm typing this... I'm going to give away a copy of these centers to the first person who comments with their email address! Or if you'd like to purchase them, you can find them at Teachers Notebook or Teachers Pay Teachers I will be having a flash sale today and tomorrow in both stores for 20%.

Hope you all have a wonderful week!

Whew. I can't believe we've been in school for over a month now. Crazy! Getting the hang of things at school and in my graduate courses has zapped most of my time, and I haven't been creating things for my classroom as much as finding so many WONDERFUL resources in blogland. So I thought I'd let you see just what we've been doing.

I co-teach in a 5th grade math class so far we have:

Reviewed multiplication and division

One "trick" to help students remember division is Dad, Mother, Sister, Brother (DMSB) which stands for Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down.) Just putting DMSB seems to help most students.

We've tried to get divisibility rules sink in. Some have, others not so much, but they are a bit abstract.

Here is a great foldable that we made, click the picture to be taken to the blogpost the idea came from. The kiddos used it as a resource throughout the week quite often.

I also found this poem, from What the Teacher Wants that I love for divisibility as well! To view it click here!
Right now we are covering square roots and square numbers. Fun stuff.

I also co-teach in a 5th grade reading class.

The first month or so, we did a novel study for the book, Because of Winn Dixie. Although, I owned this book, I had never read it nor had I seen the movie... it was a good a read. Throughout the novel we incorporated many activities from this TPT packet from Dots-N-Spots.

One activity in the packet is to create your own candy. I really need to take a picture of one of my student's candy creations. He is on the spectrum and so creative. On his own, without prompting he did an advertisement for "Greatful Gobblers" that tastes like Thanksgiving dinner down to the pumpkin pie. I was so proud!

Now that Winn Dixie is over, we've decided to switch things up. This group is full of struggling readers so we are trying something new this year. The general education teacher is starting a new novel study on Dear Mr. Henshaw while I am doing the Read Naturally program. I'm not sure if anyone out there is using it or not, but several classes in our school do, and it works well. Each student is in a leveled reading group, they start the week with a cold read, end the week with a hot read, doing various activities throughout the week. What I like about this program so far, is the repetition of reading the same passage, the use of informational texts, the ability to cover strategies (such as finding the main idea) that these kids so desperately need.

In my 4th/5th math pullout class, we've tried to cover a few major topics.

We started with place value. If you have not checked out Math Coach's Corner, please do so now. Donna is a math coach who hits the nail on the head: moving from concrete examples, to representational, to abstract. Love, love, love her activities.

This was a great freebie that really helped my kiddos with learning how to read large numbers and think about the value of different digits. The choice board can be altered (I with held a couple of cards) to differentiate more.

This blog post talks about common misconceptions with 8 place value challenges for free.

Love her idea for cupping your hands to read large numbers. Reading large numbers really boils down to reading three numbers and the commas correct name. So simple, and worked wonders!! She also had a couple of great, FREE, resources to show students the patterns within numbers, and shows how the commas are read. See the blog post here.

We also played one of her FREE games with 4 great recording/worksheets, called Go Catch. Similar to Go Fish, students were trying to get all 4 cards that show their number as seen below. Click the picture to be taken to her blog post.

We also reviewed time. One student requests this game on a weekly basis, and we covered time right off the bat. This game, called "Time Flies" was created by What the Teacher Wants. What I liked best, was that they didn't have the hands of the clock drawn on, so I could differentiate the times for the various groups working. Great freebie! Click the picture to see for yourself.

We've reviewed addition and subtraction with regrouping/borrowing. Now we are starting to get into multiplication and measurement.

With multiplication, my mentor teacher suggested using songs. Not sure where she found them, but we are currently learning our multiples of 3 from 3 to 36 to the tune of Dashing through the Snow. We also did a foldable with various strategies as seen here.
Today's lesson with perimeter included an activity in the hallway that really solidified the concept without having to just do a bunch of worksheets. I even remembered to take a picture before taking away all of the tape! We also sang a song about perimeter found here.

My final co-teaching class of the day is writing...we've covered several skills and I'm tired of typing/super hungry so I won't post as many of my finds for this category.

This Non-Fiction writing project turned into a two-day project, but worked out great. Rather than using a file-folder as shown in this blog post, we created a foldable with 8 sections for students to work with.

We've also explored, nouns (common vs. proper, singular and plural), what makes a sentence a sentence, conjunctions, just to name a few. As well as a couple of writing project.

Hope this post helps to inspire some lesson ideas. I love incorporating the wonderful ideas I find on blog posts as well as those found via Pinterest!

Happy Planning!

-Mrs. Whitehair

Oh, just saw this! Amy at the Resource(ful) room is having her 1,000 followers giveaway! If you've never been to her blog, you should check it out! She has so many wonderful ideas (and a pretty awesome give away right now!)

http://theresourseroom.blogspot.com/2012/09/1000-follower-giveaway.html

Best of luck and have fun exploring!