Jingle Jangling!

I'm so excited that December is finally here and that I can decorate without looking like a wierdo with a capital w! My kids are equally excited. . .Santa fever has hit our room && it has hit us hard. They're so excited and they definitely can't hide it. December is always a super busy month for us. During the 3 weeks that we have school we have a Christmas performance (next Thursday), Christmas Around the World baskets, Polar Express Week, our holiday party, and of course tons, and tons of learning! The end of the second nine weeks is quickly approaching and there is still so much to do! I can't believe my babies are half way ready to leave me. Seriously how do they grow up so fast?? Last week I was terrible at blogging. With the memory stick crash and a poopy week I had zero motivation to hit up blogging land. So here's my attempt to catch up.

Last week in math we were learning about word problems. . .again. This time around my lovelies were expected to use the key words (altogether, in all, are left, total, etc) to figure out which operation to use (addition or subtraction). They did pretty well on the end of the week test and I owe it all to my word problem unit Merry and Bright. I didn't post it to TpT before technology turned ugly on me, but thanks to a fabulous computer program I was able to recover it, print it, && use every portion of it. My kids ate it up and it definitely tamed their excitement. ..atleast for our math block. You can grab your copy at my Tpt store. Seriously, my kids thought it was the best thing since sliced bread!

This week for math we're learning about fact families. We're off to a slow start, but my kids are really diving head first into our Jingle Jangle unit. Of course throwing in a little Christmas spirit doesn't hurt! Anything with Santa and Christmas music is as good as gold to them and I'm absolutely loving it. Have I mentioned that I love this time of year? On Monday we learned about related addition facts and had some fun with dominoes. Each of my friends got to pick a domino and use it to create an addition fact. Then they had to switch the addends to create a related addition fact. Today we started learning about related subtraction facts. Instead of using dominoes to create equations, we used spinners. If you've never used spinners in your classroom you're missing out. I've never seen kids more excited to do WORK than when a spinner comes out. I use them whenever I can find a good reason to squeeze them in because the kids love, love, love them. For the rest of the week we'll be practicing putting everything together to create fact families. You can grab a copy of the unit by clicking on the picture below. I can hardly wait until Friday for the super cute craftivity because you know it simply wouldn't be a week in my room without making something!