Measurement, Perimeter, Fractions and Fun!

Happy weekend! I’m so excited to actually have a Saturday at home (well, mostly). 

Last Saturday was a very long, exciting—which means emotionally draining—day. We won the league tournament championship! This is the first time our girls have won the tournament championship since 1974 so we were pretty pumped.

 Pictured: My brother (head coach), my niece, my daughter, and me (assistant coach). 

We have spent the last couple weeks measuring. This week we added perimeter and an introduction to area. The kiddos love the actions and words I came up with for remembering them. I use WBT, so we do mirror with words. “Perimeter is…” Index fingers touching in front of my chin. “…the distance around the shape.” As I make a rectangle in the air. Then… “Area is…” As we make spirit fingers in the middle of our imaginary rectangle. “…in the middle!”

 Gotta love seeing those math helpers handy!

If you’ve followed our blog long, you know that in my building I teach 2^nd grade and K-2 science. This year the 1^st and 2^nd graders are combined for science. It has been pretty neat to organize my class in a way that encourages the 2^nd graders to be helpers. This week as we learned about properties of matter, it was the perfect opportunity to let the 2^nd graders “teach” the 1^st graders how to measure. 

Bonus: The first grader teacher is excited that they will have some background knowledge when she gets to her measurement unit!

We have spent the last couple of weeks learning all about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. The timing is also perfect to learn how to write a biography with all of their new knowledge. :-)

Fractions, fractions! I’m getting ready to start fractions with my class next week. Kristi’s fraction pack makes it easy to combine some fun activities with a few practice pages to supplement my plans. Easy Peasy!

That wraps up my Five for Friday post! 

Have a great weekend!

 

Marvelous Monday-Measurement, Gonoodle, Tic Tac Toe, and a Funny

Last week was filled with a lot of different activities and you know you can never go a week without a funny saying or happening in the classroom.

1.  Candy Corn Measuring-The kids loved measuring this last week because they got to use candy corn to measure.  They were so excited because they knew that at the end of it all, they would get to eat their candy corn.  They had to measure a variety of things and write down their answers.

2.  Gonoodle-My kids never get tired of doing gonoodle and it is such a great way to take a quick little brain break.

3.  Tic Tac Toe-I made up some tic tac toe boards that had the student's sight words for the week on it.  They loved playing tic tac toe and I loved that they were practicing their sight words at the same time.

4.  Funny-I had a student that I was talking to about his writing in his journal.  He had capitalized some words in his sentence and I was reminding him that we don't usually capitalize in the middle of our sentences unless it's a name etc.  He looked at me with this serious look and said, "Mrs. Torrey, this isn't the middle of my sentence, this is the middle of my sentence and I didn't capitalize there."  I had to laugh.  He was right, if you looked at the sentence, where the actual middle of it was, he didn't use a capital letter there.  I sometimes forget how literal kids can be.  I had to explain the capitalizing in a different way so that he understood it.   

Have a great day!