Addition & Subtraction War

Do your kids need some extra practice with addition and subtraction?

Mine always do!

Here's an easy game to teach your kids that can easily be switched from addition to subtraction once they know how to play the game.

What you need:

a deck of playing cards

Yes, that's it!

To start, I removed all of the face cards and the joker.

Addition War:

Students play with a partner.

1) Cut the card deck in half, one for each partner.

2) Both partners flip over 2 cards.

3) Cover largest number with one hand.

4) Beginning with that number, add by counting on.

5) The player with the highest sum wins.

Play until all the cards have been used. The player with the most cards at the end is the winner!

Change it up!

Subtraction War:

Students play with a partner.

1) Cut the card deck in half, one for each partner.

2) Both partners flip over 2 cards.

3) Cover largest number with one hand.

4) Beginning with that number, subtract by counting backwards.

5) The player with the highest largest difference wins.

Play until all the cards have been used. The player with the most cards at the end is the winner!

It's My Birthday and Five for Friday!

What better day to have a birthday than Friday of course!

And what better way to celebrate than with a little 5 for Friday.

My birthday is today and I'm throwing a 20% off my ENTIRE TpT store to celebrate.

So go get your shop on for the next 3 days to help me celebrate!

Time for a little flashback to last Friday for Halloween...my wonderful team and I participated in the character parade our school has annually. We were Cat and the Hat and the Things.

(I'm on the far left)

Then my teaching bestie and I decided to ditch the blue wigs and put on a much cuter and comfier second costume for the day...

We spend this past week reviewing digraphs. Each day we focused on a different digraph. We went on word hunts, recorded our words, and turned them into anchor charts!

In math this week we introduced positional words and used them to sequence events in the story Duck on a Bike. This cute lesson is from Lindsay Keegan.

We've spend quite a bit of time with non-fiction text and discovering schema. 

We talked about what we are "specialists" on and what we have LOTS of schema about.

They took their "specialty" and turned it into their first non-fiction writing piece and I have been BEYOND impressed!!!

Don't forget to stop by my TpT shop and to hop on over to Doodlebugs to link up!

Backwards Numbers...Still!?!?

I have never had a group of kiddos as backwards as these are....

well not the kids, their numbers!!!

It's like an epidemic.

And it's driving me crazy.

So none other than Cara to the rescue.

I came across this little gem of a lesson {here}.

I taught this lesson in small groups during Math Tub rotations.

Numbers 0-4 are good numbers.

They always line up facing the right way ready to leave.

Numbers 5-6 are bad numbers.

When they line up, they face backwards and aren't ready to leave.

Number 7-9 are good numbers.

They always face forward and see the bad numbers.

My firsties were SO able to relate to this since we line up numerous times a day.

I even refer to the numbers as the kids line up:

"Look at ____. She/he is lined up just like a (3). And uh oh, look at ______. She/he looks like a (5)."

I hung it up under our class number line and my kiddos numbers have changed drastically.

LOVE!

Spider Blends

Creepy. Crawly. Spiders.

Or should I say...

Cute. Crawly. Spiders.

Last week we finished up blends in phonics.

So why not craft it up? That's just what we did!

I paired students up and gave them a book. In the book they had to find 8 words that started with an S blend. They wrote them down on the manila sheet before making the spider.

They wrote one on each spider leg.

 Now our hallways is creeping with 's blend' spiders!

Fact Family Street

What street do you live on?

This week, we all live on Fact Family Street. 

Each student was given a sticky note with a set of 3 numbers on it.

They then had to create a fact family using the numbers and put it in their house.

This is a great quick and easy way to assess your firsties on fact families!

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

When teaching what type of books are fiction and which are non-fiction, my brain always has to stop and think about which is which. 

How come people who name things can't make them easy to remember?

Shouldn't non-fiction be NOT real?

Firsties would catch on SO much quicker that way, but since it's not here's what we've been doing.

We started off by making these 2 anchor charts together.

We sorted the different pictures after discovering the 2 types of books after looking at a pile of each and sorting them according to what, yes, BrainPop had told us to look for.

Each day we focused on a different feature and added it to our non-fiction feature chart.

I would show them examples from a non-fiction book I would read.

Then in partners, they would use a non-fiction book to find a feature in their books.

Last week was Bat Week so we did a little searching through non-fiction books about bats to record what we had learned from the features in the book.

Teaching non-fiction is definitely one of my most favorite things!

The kids are always so engaged and proud when they learn lots of facts about one certain thing.

Next up, pumpkins!

Was That a Question??

Punctuation.

Where to use it?

When to use it?

That is the question...

So, we have been constantly working on recognizing and writing questions. 

To help us recognize questions when reading, we have been writing down the "question words" we come across in books on this question mark shaped anchor chart.

The better we got at recognizing questions, we started writing them.

Each day I chose a question word off of our chart and had each student come up with a question using the question word and write it on a white board.

We shared all of our questions with each other.

And we are almost question writing pros by now!