Math Teams

Thanks to all the well wishes for my daughter. We saw the orthopedic doctor again yesterday. It had moved a bit (the bump is more visible), but they still don't recommend surgery. Hooray! We go back again in 2 weeks to see if she can take the sling off.

 

Here's what she thinks of the sling...no really, the first picture was pouty. I made her smile for this one. :-)

Okay, on to the math teams...

This summer, Kristi and I got so excited about Daily 5 that we thought we should do math groups too. Well, it has been a trial and error throughout the first semester but we have finally found a system that is working for us.

We divided our classes into 3 "teams" and rotate them through 3 "stations."

Math Teams - posted for all to see. It is week 3 and I am still checking the board constantly to see who goes where. Fortunately the kids are picking up on it faster than me. LOL!

Our three rotations...Math Journal (the page or pages out of our math books), MM is Mountain Math, and Fact Dash is an Everyday Math online game.

Math Journal - Having only 6-7 kids working on these pages at a time makes it easier to help them and get them graded.

Mountain Math - We got these center charts and had been looking for a way to consistently use them. There is a lot of Common Core (excuse me Kansas teachers as I'm not ready for another new name yet***) skills on them so we think they are very beneficial. At first pretty much all of my kiddos needed help navigating through these, but now it is just a few.

Fact Dash (or other math game) - online fact review or today we played KABOOM! (another Teacher Tipster idea)

This is our Mountain Math center chart.

We found this kid friendly worksheet to go along with the Mountain Math (the one that comes with the center leaves much to be desired) from the Teacher Tipster. We copy the worksheet and cut it into sections so that we work on one chart page each week (for now).

I'm loving it...although the room is very busy. Tuesday my principal came in for my formal evaluation and I kept looking around thinking this is chaos!!!! Then I found a nice note on my desk about her visit and the first thing she said was how organized and structured my groups were... Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought! :-)

Have a great rest of the week!
Crystal

***RE: Kansas Common Core - We just spent an inservice day on Monday going over "Common Core" again only now Kansas is calling it something else...College and Career Readiness maybe??? I promise I *did* pay attention! Feel free to chime in and correct me Kansas teachers.