Friday Book I Love & Guided Math



This is probably one of my favorite books to use.  It is about a man who is homeless and he goes around town collecting cans.  A little boy that lives in the same city decided he wanted a new skateboard so he starts collecting cans also.  He finds out that the Can Man is collecting cans to get a new winter coat and the little boy decided to give all of his can money to the man.  You have to read this book to teach your students about wants and needs and good character.  There is also a surprise at the end of the book.   I tear up a little everytime I read it!

Click on the book to be taken to Amazon!

Guided Math!

So I dove in this week finally.  The kids LOVED it!  I am still unsure about it.  I was under the impression that I was going to be able to meet with all four of my math groups everyday.  That is NOT going to happen!  I tried that this week and I got two really good groups in and the third group I met with was short and not really detailed enough.  So next week my plan is for groups to look like this:

Monday - Whole Group Place Value Lesson and pretest

Tuesday - Group 1 and Group 2

Wednesday - Group 3 and Group 4

Thursday - Reteach groups that need it

Friday - Fluency Friday (we play fluency games and take our timed tests)

Doing groups this way will allow me to teach a 20 -25 minute lesson with each group and it gives me the opportunity to reteach, in small groups, the kids that need it.

While I was meeting with my groups the rest of my groups were at other centers.

Smartboard - Have you ever visited www.gregtangmath.com??  If not, you should.  They have a game on there called kakooma and my students LOVE it!  Our school also has a subscription to Education City so I had them alternate between those two things at the SMARTboard this week.

Extra Practice - Each group had a worksheet that pertained to the extra practice that they needed.  One group had an addition worksheet, two groups had a fact family worksheet, and one group had a subtraction through 20 worksheet.

Math Tubs - Each tub had a different game that pertained to what the particular group needed.  We are a Box Cars and One Eyed Jacks school, so finding games to put in their math tubs was fairly easy.   Here is a quick overview of one of the games we played this week!

Zap - students have a deck of cards divided equally between the two players.  Each player flips over a card and the first student to add them together and yell out the answer gets to keep the cards.  You can play two ways, the student to have the most cards after going through their piles wins, or you can play until one student has all the cards.

*I am going to use this game again when I teach adding three numbers, they will just play in a group of 3 instead of a group of 2.

We also played Frosty Fact Families & Snowy Subtraction out of Katie Kings Brrr! It's Cold Outside unit!

Hope you all have a great weekend!  We are *almost* antibiotic free at my house.  My youngest went back to get her ears rechecked and I asked about a rash that she has (and has had for a while) around her waist and ankles.  Apparently it is somewhat common for kids to be sensitive to elastic in their paints waistband (and because she lives in sweatpants the elastic around the ankles). So she got put on a steroid cream to help with the hives. 

P.S.  Go check out A Sweet Little Giveaway at Fashion Crazy Learning Days!