Five for Saturday?

It just doesn’t have the same ring as Five for Friday. I really meant to write a blog post last night but I have a house  full of sickies and I passed out before I had a chance.

So here I am on Saturday afternoon while the sickies all sleep, linking up with Doodlebugs for her Five for Friday weekly Linky.

My car saga still continues. Now I can’t even drive my car because it’s pretty much driving sideways! Not a good thing with the snow we have now. Thankfully it will be getting fixed on Wednesday.

How many of you out there have student teachers right now? Mine started last week and she’s amazing! She’s been helping me keep my head on straight with the chaos of the last few weeks.

This is the art she did with my students this week:

They started with drawing a dot anywhere on the page and then drawing circles all around the dot.  Then they had to trace their arm/hand over top. We did warm colors on either the circles or the hand and then they had to do the opposite with cool colors. So if the hand was warm colors then the circles had to be cool colors.

It’s always interesting getting to sit back and watch/listen to your class as someone else gives them instructions. I find I get to know my students needs a little better than when I am the one doing the teaching.

This is also true for inquiry based learning which we have been doing a lot more of. Since it is more student centered I find I have many more conversations with my students that really lead to a better understanding of what they know and can do.

Speaking of what they know and can do….this is basically how math went this week for us:

While this video is hilarious, it is sadly pretty much how my class was this week.

I’m using many ideas from Van de Walle’s book for teaching addition and subtraction:

Many of the students are getting it but there are just so many who aren’t.  Do you know of any great math resources for teaching addition and subtraction (without regrouping) to first and second graders?  I’d love to read about some new resources I can check out.

In the next few weeks we will begin doing some problem solving.  I would really love to see what they can come up with and if they can apply any of the strategies we’ve been working on. I’ll be using my Winter Word Problems with Qr Codes booklet (since we now have snow here I feel like it’s more appropriate than my Fall Booklet).

If you’re looking for some word problems to do with your students I have a TON of them in my TPT Store!  Using word problems helps students to have a deeper understanding of mathematics. It also provides students with opportunities to be creative and flexible with their solutions. There is often more than one way to solve a problem so this allows for students to demonstrate what they know.

I try to build in as much opportunity for problem solving in my classroom as I can!

I hope you all are keeping warm and cozy on this chilly day.