No Math Textbook...Say WHAT!? {An Intro. to Addition}

As a teacher, you would think we would get use to change. We experience it often and most of the time we (not going to lie here) frown upon it. I, my friends, am here to tell you change can be a good thing!

 

The past 2 years our grade level has taught strictly from a math textbook. Daily, we would take out our book, teach from a practice page we completed together and send home the homework for them to practice. I seriously thought I was back in the stone age....I mean, who still teaches from daily workbook pages?? Praise the Lord...NOT ME!

 

I was forced to change my way of thinking and teaching from "old school style". Yes guilty as charged. I started this year with no textbook to follow for math and absolutely L-O-V-E it! Here's our journey through addition so far:

 

 

Who doesn't love learning with food!? Kids definitely do...so that's where we started our mission for learning addition.  With a beachy scenery and some goldfish, we talked through adding fish to the water, counting how many there were total, and so on.

Example: There were 3 fish swimming in the ocean. 2 more fish joined. How many fish were in the ocean?

Little did they know they were already adding!

 

We moved from goldfish to a part-part-whole chart and counters.

They learned that the part+part=whole. I would call out a number for part one, another for part two, and we would slide them together to the whole to find the total of the two parts. Easy peasy (as they like to say!).

 

After introducing more math vocabulary, we started to create number sentences. Our manipulatives for this lesson were Zoo Plates (found at Wal-Mart) to represent our number bonds and ones cubes. Again, I would tell them one number to put in the part, another number to put in the second part. We would write our addition sentence using the symbols and move the ones counters to the whole to find our answer.

 

{We also used dominoes to add numbers together and practice writing our addition sentences, but I forgot to take a picture of that day.}

 

To conclude our week, we wrote down examples all the ways we added and all of the different manipulatives we used. I pre-traced a plus sign template on a sheet of manila paper for us to glue in our math journals. We reviewed our addition vocabulary and wrote those words surrounding our "addition guy".

I look back over the past 2 years and think "shame on me for not being a better teacher"...."shame on me for taking the easy way out"...."shame on me for not taking the initiative to teach how I KNOW the kids learn"....SHAME ON ME! I challenge you who still teach that way (granted some days we do practice sheets but not daily) to take a step of 'change'. It can work wonders!