Just Some Random Bits and Bobs

Greetings friends!  Lindsay here . . .

I cannot believe that some of you are out of school already . . . NOT. FAIR.  And yes, I am cyber-pouting.  We still have 4 weeks, 4 days, and a few hours to go. Not that I am counting or anything . . .

Tonight's post is just a couple of random teacher goodies.  With Open House right around the corner my kidlets and I have been finishing up projects, doings lots of writing, and having so much fun with the RAINFOREST!!  But even in the midst of the project craziness, we have had time for lots of great math and language arts reveiw.  Check it out!

First up tonight: Amazing Alphabet Activity Pack . . .

A few weeks ago Kerri offered to share her Amazing Alphabet Activity pack (check it out HERE in her TPT store).  (She had even printed. laminated, cut out, and Ziploc-baggied all of the pieces for me!  Yippee!!)  My class had just wrapped up the last letter of the alphabet, so we were gearing up for a week of ABC review - it was perfect!  My kids LOVED all of the activities, particularly the "Alphabet Mystery Words". . .

I even used the alphabet picture/word/letter match with my RTI group and they loved it!  They were so motivated to see who could get the most matches!

Anyway, this was a fun lil unit - I highly recommend it for your end of the year kinders or fabulous fall firsties!

Next up: pockets.  Yes, as in pockets in your pants. Or your shirt.  Or . . . well, you get the idea.

My class has a wonderful volunteer who comes in to help with centers once a week named Mrs. Rogers.  She is a former teacher in my district, and her sweet grandson is in my class this year.  Mrs. Rogers is funny, adorable, encouraging, and a WEALTH of teaching ideas and information.  She introduced the "How Many Pockets?" activity to me last week and I just had to share!

The pocket activity is great for getting kids excited about estimating, comparing numbers, and practicing place value with tens and ones, and it goes a little something like this:

Mrs. Rogers kicked off the activity by posing a question to my kiddos: "I was just wondering how many pockets do you think we are wearing today altogether?" She gave my kiddos a chance to share their thoughts, and then she organized a way for them to find out.

First, she put a supply of unifix cubes at each table and told students to put one cube in each of their pockets.  Once all of my kidlets had done this, all of the extra cubes were removed from the tables. 

Mrs. Rogers then directed the class to take the cubes from their pockets, and snap them together into stacks.  Once they had done this, she gave further directions.  "Now I want you to combine all the stacks at your table into stacks of ten each."   After students had done this, each table brought their bundles of ten and their extra cubes to the rug, and each table had a representative come up and share how many pockets their table had.  After recording the totals for each table, Mrs. Rogers asked the students how they thought they could find out the answer to the original question: How many pockets did the whole class have altogether?  Students came up with the idea to count all of the bundles (or stacks) of tens, then to stack together the extra ones into MORE stacks of tens, and finally count up the extra ones.  Wow - our class had 90 pockets! 

Mrs. Rogers recorded this number on the board and challenged my class to see if they could do this activity every day for the whole week, to see if they got the same number.  Needless to say, my competitive little kiddos were up for the challenge, and the next day there were cargo pants, hoodies, and and other pocketed clothing items galore!!!  One of my little girls even wore THREE HOODIES just to help get more pockets for her table!   (Talk about dedication . . .)

This activity culminated on Friday, when my kiddos reached 119 pockets!  Oh the elation at reaching such a big BIG number!!  This activity sparked such great discussion amongst my students, even on the playground: comparing data from day to day, making predictions and estimating, even using great math vocabulary such as "more" and "less"  and "tens and ones". 

Here is picture of Mrs. Rogers getting the students to think about how many pockets they thought the whole class might have . . . (Notice the child in green thinking very, VERY hard! )

And THIS is my dedicated little mathmatician wearing three hoodies and putting her unifix cubes into each pocket:

And finally, here is a little recording sheet to use with this activity.  At the end of the week you can have your kidlets practice writing a true statement about what they observed, such as: "There were more pockets on Tuesday than on Wedensday", etc.

(Click on the image to download recording sheet)



Well, that is it for now!  Let me know if you try to count pockets with your kiddos!  The number to beat is 119! 

Lindsay