Presidents' Day + Freebie February

One of my favorite activities leading up to Presidents' Day is a probability center.  My students work in pairs flipping a penny 100 times and recording the results:  heads or tails.  A great bonus to this center is that it is usually close to our 100th day, so groups of 100 are fresh in our minds.

Each pair receives a set of 10 ten frames. Prior to starting, they predict how many times they will get heads and how many times they will get tails.  They write their predictions on the back of their recording sheet.  

My students take turns being the flipper and the recorder, switching jobs after filling each ten frame.  They record an H each time they get heads; T each time they get tails.  

At the end, they compute how many of each they got.  The final step is to compare their prediction to their reality. My kiddos love this activity.  I'll bet your's will, too.

It's day 10 of Freebie February! 

Just for today, you can get Patriotic Squares Critical Thinking. This activity is also known as Latin Squares. 

Enjoy!

You might enjoy these patriotic products, too:

Freebie February -- Day 9

Today's freebie is a brand new product that I had such fun creating.

Meet Harry, the Hare. Harry is rather hairy, but as cute as can be. He is ready to challenge your students' knowledge of homophones.  

Most homophone exercises are multiple choice, fill in the blank. Harry has put a little twist on his homophones. Each of the 28 task cards gives a clue to lead your students to a homophone pair. This exercises their verbal fluency and higher order thinking skills. It also helps to build their vocabulary and it may lead some to consult a thesaurus.

You can snag your free copy of Hairy Harry's Homophone Task Cards for 1 day only because it's FREEBIE FEBRUARY!

These forever freebies are perfect for this time of year:

Freebie February -- Day 8

It's day 8 of my Freebie February. 

Today's freebie is Matching Mittens Literacy  Center. If you read any of The Mitten books to your class, this center is a perfect accompaniment to it. 

The foci of the center are initial consonant blends and rhyming words.  

This center activity is CCSS aligned for primary grades.

My favorite version of The Mitten is Jan Brett's.  What's your fav?

You may also like these literacy centers:

Freebie February Day 7

It's day 7 of Freebie February!  Today's offering is Animal Ordinal Number Task Cards.  

These task cards provide practice with ordinal number concepts and words from 1st - 35th. There are 4 sets of cards included; each set tells a story in a different animal theme. 

Through these tasks, your students will not only practice ordinal number concepts, but also patterns, interpreting data, logic, critical thinking, A-B-C order, and computation.  

If you are enjoying February Freebies, please consider leaving some feedback on TPT. Thank you.

You may also like:

Day 6 of Freebie February

It's about time for Valentine's Day, so today's freebie is Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllable Sort.  I wrote about this literacy center a couple of days ago, but in case you missed it, here's the upshot:

Friendly Frog appears in many of my syllabication products. This time he challenges your students to sort word cards according to whether they have a prefix or a suffix. Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllables Center is a low prep literacy center.  

Just for today, you can score this center for FREE!  I hope you enjoy it.

You can also get these Valentine's Day centers for FREE: 

And this one is quite inexpensive:

Freebie February and Sponge Activities

Today is all about sponge activities.  We all need them for those awkward few minutes before the bell rings, or before you leave for your specials class, or ...  You know.

Some of the best sponge activities are those that need no prep. I have 1 that my kiddos love and all it requires are a sticky note and a chalkboard or whiteboard. I call it Mystery Number. I write the Mystery Number on the back of the sticky note (the side that sticks to the board). After drawing a number line on the board, I put the sticky note in the middle of the number line. 

As students guess, I write their guesses on the number line and ask if the guess is greater than or less than the Mystery Number. Obviously, when the correct number is guessed, I turn over the sticky note and congratulate the students. This really helps children with numeration concepts.  

Since I'm focused on sponge activities, the Freebie February product for today is one that can readily fill those odd moments. Triads I combines critical thinking with vocabulary development. It disguises lots of learning with tons of fun. 

The Triad cards show 3 words which can be linked by 1 word.  In this example, the common word is CARD; birthday CARD, credit CARD, and CARDboard. As you can see, the common word can come before or after the given words. The answers can be compound words or common phrases.  

Triads I is a super sponge activity, but it is also excellent for enrichment, lovely for literacy centers, and fabulous for fast finishers.  I strongly urge you to solve several Triads as a whole group to get your kiddos cerebral cogs turning.  

You may also like:

Freebie February Day 4

It's about time, teachers, to reveal Freebie February's 4th offering...

Valentine's Day Square Puzzler is a critical thinking activity that will really test your students' tenacity and problem solving skills. The challenge is to recreate a square using the square puzzle pieces so that all of the images match on every interior side.  Like this:

In this example, the last piece will NOT fit there. The other pieces will have to be rearranged.

This product includes 3 puzzles; a 2x2 (above) that is perfect for starting out and for young learners, a 3x3 (at right) which is exponentially more difficult, and a 4x4 that is challenging, even for adults.

These puzzles are quite versatile. You can put them in a center and easily differentiate for your students. They are useful as an anchor activity and are absolutely perfect for fast finishers.  This is one activity they are unlikely to finish in a flash.  They also make a sane activity for a Valentine's Day party.

My G/T students beg to work with square puzzlers, but I find almost all students love them. (Students who are easily frustrated may shy away from these puzzles.)

This activity is utterly awesome when you want/need to observe how your students problem solve.  

Grab your copy now! It's only free for 1 day.

If your students love these puzzles, and I'm sure they will, you may be interested in these: