Even More FEBRUARY FREEBIES!!

It's about time, teachers, for some more February FREEBIES!

SCRATTLE: Patriotic Edition is differentiated, making it appropriate for all grades 1-5.  Students make words from a collection of letters, then compute the value using addition, multiplication, or mixed operations.  There is a recording sheet for each of the named computation requirements.  Next they engage a friend in a Scrattle Battle, comparing their word values as =, >, or <.  The word warrior with the most >s wins!  Stand back and watch your learners quickly eschew those 3 and 4 letter words for longer ones.

February is Dental Health Month, so attend to that with this FREE product.  It includes a song, class graphing, lost tooth bags, a word find, scrambled sentences, tooth idioms, and tooth problems math.

It's Leap Year and your students will leap for joy with this free unit.  Included are word work, verbal fluency exercises, and math challenges.

February is fabulous and filled with freebies from my store.  Enjoy!

It's About Time for Valentine's Day Parties

It's About Time, Teachers for Valentine's Day Parties!

The class party for Valentine's Day is my absolute favorite party of the year.  That's because I have my students create their own treat! It's such fun to see how creative (and excessive) 1st graders will get.

Here's how it works:

• Ask your room parents to bake heart shaped sugar cookies for the party. They should NOT decorate them!  Ask them to use the largest heart shaped cookie cutter possible. That way you will need only 1 cookie per student. Since many children now have peanut and other nut allergies, I recommend using Pillsbury Sugar Cookie dough since it is safe for those with allergies. That is, of course, if the bakers are not making dough from scratch.

        

• The room parents should also provide tubs of frosting; 1 tub for every 4 or 5 children. That's way more than is needed, but it certainly cuts down on the sharing problems that 6 & 7 year olds can exhibit.

• Have enough plastic knives to allow each child to have their own. If you are nervous about knives, even tho' plastic, tongue depressors also work well.

• Your students should gather around decorating centers (paper covered tables) supplied with the above mentioned frosting tubs, plastic knives, and a generous supply of decorative sprinkles and colored sugar crystals.

• Now stand back and let your children have the time of their lives.  They will almost certainly create cookies that are piled high with every decoration within their reach and that are nearly inedible.  But, they will have fun.
• Clean up is as easy as whisking the paper covering the tables into the garbage. Woo hoo!

This party plan will take up most of your allotted celebration time, so room parents will not need to plan any games or crafts.  You may even find that there is insufficient time to open their valentines at school.

Enjoy your Valentine's Day party with your little sweeties.

Freebie February and Lost Tooth Tales

You probably use math journals. Do you need some subject matter for those prompts? During Dental Health Month, you have ample material. After all, losing and gaining teeth is a natural subtraction and addition situation.  

Make the journal prompts extra interesting by programming the problems with your students' names. For example:  

For a fun math center, put the tooth problems on tooth shapes. Copy them on cardstock and laminate. Store them at the center inside the pillowcase on an infant sized pillow.  

And now, it's about time for today's February Freebie:

MAD about MARCH, a Thematic Unit for Primary Grades includes activities in language arts, math, and music.

The activities in this unit are field tested and most appropriate for K – 2 classrooms. They include opportunities for differentiation of instruction and enrichment.

Remember, it's only free for 1 day.

You may also like:

How Many Ways? Critical Thinking Challenge

I'd like to introduce you to How Many Ways? - February Edition.

If you like critical thinking math challenges for your students...

If you like open-ended activities that take very little prep...

If you like interactive bulletin boards that stay up for an entire month...

...then you will love How Many Ways? -- Feb. Edition. 

Here's the 4-1-1:

This is what your bulletin board could look like. For this example, your students are challenged to get to the target number, 30, using the numbers on the hearts and any combination of the specified operations. So, they could use just addition and get there in these ways:

4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 = 30    

or

4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 30

By adding or substituting another operation sign, such as x, students can find the target number in many more ways. For example:

(4 x 4) + (4 x 4) - 2 = 30

 3 x (1 + 2 + 3 + 4) = 30 

(4 x 3) + (3 x 2) + (3 x 3) + 3 = 30

How fun is that? Clearly there are many, many, many equations that can be constructed to equal 30. However, you are not done. Not even close. 

Included in this product are 29 more target numbers, plus 3 blank targets for you to program. Also included is a division sign, should your students be ready for that operation. 

It is up to you to determine how challenging this activity is. If you teach the littlest learners, you can program the center to just require counting. I have even included number hearts with counting dots.  

If you teach older students, this activity will challenge them to use algebraic equations (although the variable is implied), reinforcing the order of operations and the value of parentheses.

As you can see, the heart icons are presented in color and black line.  If you choose to use the black line hearts, I encourage you to copy them on colored paper.

How Many Ways? -- Feb. Edition works well as a math center.  I provide heart shaped paper for students to record their equations and let them post them on the adjacent board. We post them in columns of 10, making it easy to determine how many ways we have found.

It is also a great anchor activity and/or sponge activity.  But my favorite way to use this activity is as a challenge for fast finishers.  It is not only highly engaging for those quick minds, but I also use them as checkers.  That is, they review the posted solutions to make sure they are accurate.  If they agree, they can put a little valentine sticker on the equation to validate it, as well as to show that it has already been checked.

Now that you've met How Many Ways? -- Feb. Edition, I hope you will become life long friends.

Have you met the other members of the family?
    

        

Groundhog Day Center Freebie

Scrabble™ and its social networking cousin, Words with Friends™, are jumping off the computer screen and finding their niche in the classroom.  In my classroom, my students love to play SCRATTLE (SCRAbble + baTTLE).

It's always great fun to take a set of letters and challenge your class to make as many words with them as they can.  In Scrattle, I'm upping the ante by adding a math component and competition.  By doing so, I'm ensuring that my students are trying their hardest and I'm getting double duty out of this center.

Here's how it works:

• Give your students the letter set for this edition of Scrattle.

• Students cut out the letters.
• Students find a partner to battle.
• Armed with a recording sheet, the partners record the words they can devise individually.
• Once their recording sheets are filled, the students calculate the values of their words by adding the numbers on their letter pieces.
• Alternatively, older students calculate the value by multiplying the numbers.
• To differentiate for G/T and enrichment students, a combination of operations is available.  (It is possible that this version will create negative numbers.)
• After their calculations are completed, the partners compare their numbers, filling in their opponent's scores on the recording sheet. 
• Students then add >, <, or = to the scores box.
• The student with the most > scores is the winner.

This activity is CCSS aligned.  You can download it on Google Docs.

Enjoy!

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Presidents' Day Poetry FREEBIE!

It will soon be Presidents' Day.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know that must mean it is time for a poetry freebie!  So, here it is. . .

It is also time for a some Poetry Possibilities to go with the poem...

Following is a preview of the literacy center referred to in #3 of the Poetry Possibilities...

You can download the poem for free by going here.

This poem is taken from my Poetry Possibilities -- February.  The product has 17 poems and nearly 30 pages of skills, centers, and activities.  The range of reading levels in the poetry makes this product appropriate to both primary and intermediate classrooms. Possibilities for differentiation are included.  

Hats off to President Lincoln and to a holiday from school!