It's My Birthday Week && I'll Blog If I Want To...

I'm not going to lie, I had a solid case of the Sunday night blues last night. It was cold outside, I had my super warm Uggs on, a mug of hot apple cider, and I was pretty sure that the last thing I was going to want to do in the morning would be to get out of my nice warm bed. Annnnd I was right. . .it was freezing this morning and I definitely didn't want to get out of my bed. Ugggh Mondays why do you have to be so tough??? This week is my birthday week. . .the 28th anniversary of my birth...so atleast there's a chance to wear a tutu (kidding. . .kidding...maybe). March also brings St. Patrick's Day and my first wedding anniversary! Spring break is right around the corner (4 weeks away to be exact) and the new wine kit finished up last night which means lots of delicious Peach Chardonnay! Yummmm!

There's definitely a lot of fun to be had in the fabulous month of my birth. However, there's also a to do list a mile long to get through before my loves and I can all eat Reeses peanut butter eggs and peeps! So without further ado. . .here's March: Week 1- -Math (or atleast what it looks like on paper...so far).

Basically we'll be doing a lot of reviewing for the next two weeks because the end of the third nine weeks is rapidly approaching and with that comes benchmark testing. This week I will be focusing on reviewing the following skills:
1. Missing Addends & Subtrahends
2. Graphing
3. Telling Time (Hour and Half Hour)
4. Comparing Numbers
5. 2 Digit Addition & Subtraction

I have a fun little unit in the works that's a hodge podge of all of these skills. It's not completely ready to be posted to TPT, but I'll be working to get it up in the next few days. The one part of the review unit that is already up is the portion about Missing Addends and Subtrahends. I'm finally getting to pull in my Tooth on the Loose unit and I'm crossing my fingers that my kids this year like it as much as my kids from last year. Tooth on the Loose is already available in my TPT store.

It's a 39 page unit with an activity to practice finding missing addends and another to practice finding missing subtrahends. Three homework/independent practice options are also included. The read aloud that I like to use to kick of this lesson is You Think It's Easy Being the Tooth Fairy? by S. Bell-Rehwoldt. After grabbing their attention with the read aloud, we review how to find missing addends and subtrahends through the use of the activity cards. I play music. . .they can dance around like the silly billies that they are. . .and then when the music stops they have to sit at a seat with a card and find the missing addend or subtrahend.

After all of the hoopla that comes with the practice round, it's time for the best part- -the craftivity!! I give my kids a circle pattern for the head (as always) and a star pattern for the wand and then they're on their own to create the rest of the tooth fairy.This is for Friday (I always save the messy stuff for the last day of the week so I can close the door and leave it for the vacuum to pick up. . .and hope that 2 days is long enough for the custodians to not want to pinch the tar out of me when we return).

Anyway, today we practiced our graphing skills. Since it's been kind of like a zoo in my classroom, it was the perfect day to begin the Wild About Math pack (it's on the way to TPT by the end of the week). I started by reading my favorite book of. all. time. from when I was little Put Me in the Zoo by R. Lopshire. The kids loved it. . .I loved it (of course). . .and we were definitely ready to get the party started with spinners! There are few things that my kids love more than spinners (I think I've mentioned this before in my blog). Skittles, dancing, and stickers are a few, but spinners simply knock their socks off. My kids sit at tables with atleast 2 other friends so I gave each table a zoo animal spinner card and a paper clip. They used their pencils to anchor the paper clip to the spinner and they spun, spun, spun until they couldn't spin anymore.

Each time a group member spun the spinner, they had to make a tally mark next to the animal that it landed on. At the end of the spinning time they had to count up their tally marks and create a bar graph. Then they had to answer questions about their graph by analyzing their data. Data can also be collected by having your students poll their classmates instead of spinning spinners. I wasn't in the mood for all the chaos on a Monday morning, but it does work (make sure you model the expectations or things can get a little bananas). Despite a few arguments of the 6 year old kind, it was a pretty flawless review lesson.

Tomorrow we're going to be reviewing telling time to the hour and the half hour. Some of my sweet things are having a major struggle with the half hour concept and the clock is winning. No matter how I break it down they're just not grasping that the hour is only half way done and that the hour hand hasn't visited the next hour yet. They get it for the day but it's disappeared from their brain the next. It's enough to drive a teacher crazy! Keeping up with the "wild" theme tomorrow's lesson is a dinosaur theme. I'll be reading the book Edwina the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct by M. Willems. I'll blog more about it tomorrow because I've got some egg drop soup calling my name and after running 2.5 miles I'm starving! Until tomorrow. . .live, love, teach!