Regrouping with Base Ten (Freebie)

My students and I have moved on to addition in our math studies. In my province Grade 3's are expected to do 2-digit addition using mental math and 3-digit addition using student created and standard algorithms. 

Here's a quick little freebie for you. I've created 2 versions depending on the needs of your students.

Large 2-digit numbers

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Small 2-digit numbers

Nothing At All To Do With Teaching What So Ever

I've been working on all sorts of posts.

Math workshop posts.

Freebie posts.

Follow up prediction posts.

(Finally getting back to) Follower Feature posts.

But...I've also been battling the flu/food poisoning. My daughter had surgery. It's report cards. The rain hasn't stopped for 5 days now.

Do you ever have these weeks? Separately none of these things would probably faze me all that much. Combine them all into a 5 day period....wow.

The biggest one has been my daughter's surgery. She had a small cyst in her right eyebrow since birth and the doctor thought it best to take it out and check it...just in case. I've known all along that it wasn't a big deal. It's barely even a surgery, but watching them- strangers basically- take away my daughter while she cried and reached out for me was too much. As soon as she was out of sight I collapsed into my husband's arms. For the first time in her little life she was with people I didn't know very well, hadn't researched or spent considerable time with and she was in a room I probably couldn't even find if I wanted to. I mean, I couldn't even find my way back to the waiting room. Some doctor took pity on a crying mother clutching a baby blanket and directed my husband and I to where we wanted to go.

In all actuality she was probably only away from us for 60 minutes tops. She was wide awake when I arrived in the recovery room. They barely even put her under, just enough to give local anesthetic and complete the necessary steps to remove the cyst. But it was long enough. It was too long.

It occurred to me last night that I never once asked to see anyone's ID badge. I didn't even really hear their names when they told me. I trusted the system and allowed strangers to take my daughter, perform surgery on her and trusted I would get her back. 

I did.

And she's fine. She's got a little black eye, a bunch of new toys and an appointment to go back and get her stitches out. She got to eat as many popsicles as she wanted on the peds floor. She had a long nap the afternoon after the surgery and never looked back. 

I, on the other hand, am still exhausted and traumatized days later.

I promise to get some real posts out soon especially now that I have reached the end of my babbling. If you are still here, thanks for listening. 

I needed that. 

Frayer Model Freebie

I have a quick freebie for you tonight. I have been using the Frayer Model for many years in my classroom, mostly when I taught the upper grades. Now that we are a few weeks into the school year I decided to see if my Grade 3's were ready to use them as well!

This is the small one that I use for my student's math journals.

Small Frayer Model- blank

This is a larger one that I use for notes in classes like Social Studies and Science.

Large Frayer Model- blank

This is a subject specific one that my students and I used in our Social Studies unit on Urban and Rural Communities.

Urban and Rural Frayer Model

I think Frayer models make for great notes as it gives students a written definition, examples and a visual reminder of the concept. 

Hope you find it useful!

Font: Rowdy Spunky from Rowdy in Room 300

Math Class Routines- Whole Class Lesson

We are still working on getting Math Workshop up and running....slowly, slowly...sooooooo slowly!

In the meantime we are working on in Math. Here are some highlights of what I've been doing. 

Place Value lesson board- big ideas and sample problem

Number line math stretch

Skip counting beans!

So many different ways to count!

This is my math lesson board. We start with a minds on or simple problem that we complete together and discuss. 

Here's what we came up with for our skip counting lesson. 

Then we look at the lesson problem and break it down. What is it asking us? What are the key words and what tools can we use to solve this problem. 

And then they work!! Once the class has completed the problem all of the solutions are posted and debriefed as a class. This was our first time posting the student work so I modelled the type of math talk I expect and wrote anecdotes one the board to show patterns in our counting. 

Close-up of student work.

UPDATE!!! Here is the picture of the Big Ideas/Highlights we brainstormed as a class.

And then the sample lesson is posted. For this lesson the student completed a question independently in their Math Journals. It was:

How many ways can you count to 200? 363? 

It was interesting to see what they came up with- counting by 2s, 5s, 10s, 20s, 40s, 25s etc. And what they didn't... three students told me it was impossible to count to 363...hmmm?

I guess more practice is still needed!!

How do you organize your whole class math lessons?

Starting to Work on Retells

My class is starting to move towards retells of the texts we are reading. That means we are using some of the great strategies I have learned about from reading The Power of Retelling. Here is a look at our most recent Books of the Week.

Every Monday we do predictions and vocabulary. Two weeks ago I had my students predict independently and post it on chart paper. I have found that the more we talk about predictions and justify the reasons we used to make the predictions the better my students are getting at this skill. 

Last week, we very quickly made predictions because I felt that the title "Larf" didn't really lend itself to making predictions and other than predicting that the book was about bigfoot/a sasquatch based on the cover there wasn't much else to go on!

Which was fine because I was really excited to get to our story mapping chart. 

We then moved on to finishing some sentence stems for our interpretations of of the book...and I discovered that my students really need some work in this area!! 

Here are some of the good ones...

Yesterday we completed a sequence GO! chart for our retell. My class seems to be on the ball so far with retells, but of course we were all together on the carpet. Time will tell.