It's About Time, Teachers, for Spring!

Just in time for spring, I have finished updating and refreshing these spring products:

 

 

• Spring Square Puzzlers - an excellent activity for exercising your students’ problem solving and critical thinking skills. These puzzles provide a quick and easy activity for teachers looking to challenge fast finishers, create differentiation opportunities, and provide enrichment exercises. The challenge with these puzzles is to reconstruct the square so that all of the images match on every interior side.
• SCRATTLE: Spring Edition - a learning center activity that combines word work with computation; individual effort with competition. As in Scrabble™, students use a set of letters to create words. After recording their words, they calculate each word’s score using the letter values. Then they engage a friend in a battle wherein they compare their scores using >, <, and =. The pupil with the most >s wins the battle! (SCRAbble + baTTLE = SCRATTLE!) This product offers instant differentiation in that it provides 3 different recording sheets. SCRATTLE can be played by students with basic addition capabilities. This makes it useful for primary teachers and as an RTI resource. Students capable of advanced multiplication will be best served by the second recording sheet. Those skilled in solving mixed operations in complex equations will enjoy the third option.
• Poetry Possibilities for Spring - a collection of 20 poems about spring celebrations and activities with custom designed skill lessons. This poetry unit incorporates poetic elements, poetic forms, writing, grammar, multiple subject areas, and craftivities. There are even directions for a class play! 
• Poetry Possibilities for Animal Poems - a science and literacy unit incorporating multiple subjects through poetry. This collection of 12 animal poems provides teaching points, skill lessons, and activities custom designed for each poem. It masterfully combines language arts with science.  It even includes center activities.

If you already own these resources, please download the new version.  You'll be glad you did.  If you don't have them, try them!  I think you'll like them. 

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April Math Center

It's about time, teachers, for ...

And a new month means new math centers and bulletin boards. Combine both in How Many Ways? - April Edition.

This is a fun, open ended, critical thinking, math challenge. It works well as: 

• an anchor activity
• a math center
• a sponge activity 
• a challenge for fast finishers 

Similar to Boggle, the challenge in this activity is to arrive at a target number in many different ways. It readily provides differentiation by allowing the teacher to choose between 2 questions: one asks students to count to the target number; one requires students to use math operations to arrive at the target. It may be easily adapted to any elementary grade level and provides differentiation within a single grade.

Reproduce the raincloud icons and place them on a bulletin board along with the How Many Ways? question of your choice. These icons come in color and black line; with and without counting dots. Choose the math operation(s) appropriate for your students and post them, as well. Then invite your students to determine how many ways they can reach the target number. Students may use each icon only once, however, they need not use every icon. Add an extra challenge by requiring that the numbers used must touch each other.

This activity is CCSS aligned. 

My students use Post It notes. They write their equation(s) on a Post It and stick it up along the side of the display. At the end of each day, we calculate How Many Ways we found the target number.  Then I put up a new target number and we are ready to go for the next day.

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