We love playing games in my class. I love that we are having fun while learning and the kids are enjoying themselves. I love when I find free games and am introduced to sites that either have games to print out and play or games we can play online. One site that has games ready to print the boards out and go (free!) you can find here K-5 Math Teaching Resources. There are also many fun games from Shari Sloane found on this site (for free too!). I have bump, and clear the board, and shape fill in and kindergarten yahtzee printed out. For the games that are boards kids color on, I put copies in a shoe box tub. For the gameboards that can be used over and over again, I either have laminated or put in a page protector. I cannot for the life of me find a picture I am certain I took of how the tubs look now (they are "fancy" and all have labels with pictures). Makes me feel really put together. haha. Anyway, here is what the tubs look like pre-labels. (also ignore the ugly ASL poster in the corner.. that is updated and looks SO MUCH BETTER).
When we go to the computer lab, the kids love Starfall, I also like having them play Alphabet Goop, (especially at the beginning of the year) and Fun4theBrain... to name a few. On Fun4theBrain I usually start in class whole group to introduce a game. The one I usually start with is Diaper Derby. I also like to do the pumpkin picking one or the dinosaur digging one, oooh and the penguin milkshake shop. The kids love it, and I love that they are practicing math. A couple other sites/games I really like to use are # Flash and the interactive 10 frame found here. I have a bunch of other sites that are great for other things and other tools, but I will share some of those at another time.
Last week I really started hammering into subtraction, we work A LOT on addition all of last quarter and many of my kiddos can do their math facts to 5 pretty fluenty... I am SO proud of them. I read Ten Sly Piranhas. I got this book in a set of math books I got from a training my first year of teaching. If you haven't read it, it is so cute! Here is a link to it on Amazon.
After we read it, I gave the kids a blue piece of copy paper and told them to draw an underwater setting with no fish or animals. We discussed what they could include. I gave them a little over 5 minutes and then a cup of gold fish crackers. I told story problems out loud and the kids used their self created mats to act the problem out. Their favorite part, of course, was eating the fishes.
Yesterday, I had the kids draw their own snowman, but told them they could not add buttons. Bless their little hearts, "Miss Jameson, can we add details?!" I have been drilling details in writing and pictures since the beginning of the year. I LOVE that they want to add detail (various and proper colors and the hats, scarves, arms, etc. to their snowmen and snow girls.) After a few minutes to draw their snowman, we used our stacker counters that are round and told story problems out loud while the kids used their mats to model. Then I would have kids use their math talk to help retell the story and be able to write the equation all together. We did this again today. At the end to change things up a little, we also did stories such as "Your snowman has 5 buttons. Some of them are red and some of them are blue." I love that they were picking up on combinations. Today we worked with a partner to do a 10 combination.
Last week we read a bunch a books that included snow, snowmen etc and are continuing this week. I think we might even do a graph that is asking if the kids have every played in the snow because we just don't get snow (and when it does it does not stick) in our neck of the woods in Arizona. Gotta love the desert! :) We then worked together to discuss the setting, characters, and something about the story. This could be what you liked or something that happened. It took us a good chunk of time, but they turned out SO CUTE! We did them step by step. If/when I do something like this again, I will probably do a piece a day to take less time and then assemble on the last day. You can do this with beginning, middle, end or almost anything you want. I went "old fashion" :) and hand draw the round pieces for the snowmen. I thought about letting the kids draw their own pieces, but I know some of them would make them far too small to be able to add the content. We did this with the story The Smiley Snowman.
It is time for bed for this teacher. Tomorrow is hump day! yay!
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