Box Cars and One-Eyed Jacks Workshop

Tomorrow our district is hosting the folks from Box Cars and One-Eyed Jacks.  I am so excited!  They will be providing two workshops on math games for K-2 students and 3-5 students.  They also have all their games aligned to the Common Core.  After I was lucky enough to attend a few of their workshops, I started creating videos to help my students with math games at home.  Box Cars and One-Eyed Jacks even started posting them on their website.  If you ever get a chance to see them or have them come to your district, you will be very lucky!

p.s.  They will be at NCTM in Chicago later this week.

Ways To Show a Number

Math Coach's Corner has a great activity for students this holiday season.  It is a poster to help them show different ways to represent a number.  I really like this because she has included ten frames into the project.

Guided Math Games Organization

Here is a great blog about how to organize your guided math games.  Take a gander at Tales From a K  Classroom.

Math Workstations

Hop over to Peterson's Pad for some amazing math workstation ideas.  I especially like the activity Dice Numbers because you can use different sided dice to differentiate the activity for your students.

Math Stretch Numbers 1-121

I was very fortunate to attend Laney Sammon's Guided Math session for our district's institute day.  One of the big ideas we discussed were "math stretches."  A math stretch is a way to get the children thinking about math when they walk into the classroom in the morning.  A group of first grade teachers and I developed a math stretch based on  the first grade Common Core objective of being able to start at any number and count on.  Attached is a grid we created.  The idea is to make it larger so that each student can write a missing number on the chart.  Then when we get together,  I can ask the children: What patterns did you noticed?  What information helped you choose the number you wrote in the box?

Apps to Build Number Sense

Did you know that Augustana College has a number sense project?  They sent their university students into the schools to work with kindergartners.  This morphed into a series of educational apps to build number sense.  The apps are not super fancy, but they do focus on building number sense with ten frames, subitizing, and number lines.

Here is the list I am hoping to purchase for our iPads at school.

Line 'em Up  Free
10 Frame Fill  Free
What's Hiding? $0.99
Word Problems  Free
Thinking of a Number  $0.99
Pattern Sets   $0.99

Great Teacher Resource

Have you checked out the Teaching Channel yet?  There are a lot of great videos there to give you ideas for strengthen your students' number sense.

I really like the one called Mingle to use as a brain break when children need to get up and move.