5 For Friday January 10

The first week after vacation is officially in the bag and it is time to link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

This week my classroom mom came in for origami lessons.  This week's origami was a swan!

We have been up to our eyeballs in division, but one of my kiddos is just starting multiplication.  I have been working on some concrete representations.  I gave her some flash cards and she drew circles on the table and some colored discs inside and she is getting the hang of it!

This week was a testing week with common assessments for both ELA and Math.  Our district has unit assessments that all of our students take.

We have been working on Common Core for the past two years, and our scores on the common assessments have been less than stellar.  So, I was super excited to see our scores today - still not fabulous by any stretch of the means, but lets just say we rarely see blue or green.

A step in the right direction!  Can't wait to share this with my students on Monday!

Here is a little testing funny I found as I was grading the tests.  It cracked me up!

This is how I am ending my week...

I started feeling a little tickle in my throat yesterday and now it is full blown!  Thank goodness today was a 1/2 day for the kiddos because of the end of semester because I felt awful!  I was able to get my grades in quickly and head to the store and now I'm home and headed to bed!

Delightful Division

Just a few weeks ago when I began introducing long division, I never dreamed that I would title a blog post Delightful Division - yet here I am!  My kiddos are really starting to get it and many are even saying, "Long division is fun!"  Here are a few of the things we have done to get to that point.

Manipulatives Are A Must!

Hands on is definitely the way to go!  Getting them to understand the concrete concepts and place value is so crucial.  We have a Duck Dynasty Division theme going on, so we used the idea of them packing duck calls equally into boxes.  Then I gave them base ten blocks and we started working on two digit division problems.  The problem above shows 36/3.  The student drew three "boxes" and divided the duck calls (base ten blocks) into the boxes.  Later we worked with the idea of regrouping the tens into units when the numbers didn't work out evenly.

Going from Concrete to Representational

This picture I love because it shows a student invented method of solving the problem that she devised all on her own after using the base ten blocks. The problem above shows 598/2.  She drew two "boxes" on her board and then began to divide first by 100s, then 50s, then 40s, then ones.  Her own version of partial product method I suppose.  I really love this because she is one of my strugglers, so to see her think so out of the box is AMAZING!  I am so proud of her!

Have A Little Help From My Friends

Peer tutoring is something I believe strongly in!  I pair my kiddos who "get it" with a few who are still working on it and let them work together.  The "teacher kid" coaches as the others work along.  They love this!  They don't mind if they are coaches or the coached - they just love working with their peers.

The best part is that they are totally engaged and on-task!

They were using cards from my Don't Duck Division Long Division Style Game, but any task cards would work as well.

Games!

Speaking of the Don't Duck Division Game, we also played a lot of rounds of this game.  I love using games with my students because they hardly realize they are learning when they are playing a game!

They really loved seeing their favorite Duck Dynasty characters on the cards and have been asking me, "How did you do that Mrs. Malloy?"

We finish our division assessments on Friday and then it is on to fractions next week.  What are you working on in math?

First Few Days Back - Reviewing Expectations and Re-Building Daily 5 Stamina

Well, I have survived the first two days back after vacation!  They haven't been bad, but I have been exhausted after resting for two weeks straight.  The behavior has been amazing so far (knock on wood) and may be due in part to the fact that I planned to review expectations and re-build Daily 5 stamina this week.  Just like the first week of school we have been reviewing and practicing.  I started with a True/False PowerPoint review of our rules.

You can download this freebie at Teachers Pay Teachers here.

Even if you have already gone back to school you can pin it and save it for next year : D.  It is fully editable.

Then, we practiced building up our Daily 5 stamina.  We reviewed the expectations and wrote them on the board.  Then we practiced just like the beginning of the year with me calling them back to the carpet as soon as one person was off task.

(ignore my messy handwriting!)

I am not going to lie - it was a little ugly the first day - our best time (not shown) was a little over 9 minutes.  Luckily, by day 2 we were back on track.

23 minutes - can I get a woot woot?

Ahhhh!  Daily 5 Bliss - ready for me to work with small groups and meet for individual conferences!  A few days of reinforcing those expectations is so worth it!  What have you done to reinforce expectations since you have gone back to school?

Should Old Procedures Be Forgot... Reviewing Expectations After the Holiday Break

Last day of the holiday and I can no longer procrastinate any longer - I have to get in the lesson planning mode again unless I want supreme chaos in my classroom tomorrow morning!  Speaking of supreme chaos - after two weeks away from school, I know that I am going to have to remind my kiddos of what our classroom expectations are.   I was absolutely inspired  when I saw this post from The Science Penguin to make my own True or False PowerPoint to review my own classroom expectations during our morning meeting tomorrow.  I will show the students the PowerPoint and have them use either a thumbs up for true or a thumbs down for false (or I might have them show me a T or F in sign language).

We use Whole Brain Teaching in our class, so several of  the slides address the 5 rules.

Well, I'm sure you know what the answer is to that one!  LOL!  I have uploaded a file that you can customize to meet your needs as a FREEBIE on Teachers Pay Teachers.

What things do you do to review expectations after the holiday?

Spelling Scaffold

As I was going through my photos for yesterday's 5 For Friday Post, I found this picture of spelling tests I had taken right before the break, and I remembered that I had wanted to share something that has really increased my student's performance on their weekly spelling tests.

I use Words Their Way, and we work with the patterns and rules, but for some reason, a large majority of my students were still failing the tests each week.  When a large majority are having a difficult time, I know I have to change something about my instruction.

I asked one of our special ed teachers if she had any suggestions since I have a few of her kiddos.  She suggested shortening the list and using boxes for the tests.  Well, I decided to try it for ALL of my kids.  We now spend three weeks going over a pattern with a test over one row plus two words from a previous test that are a surprise to the students (to ensure that they don't just learn it for the test, but keep it in their memory.  I also print out spelling boxes for the test using this worksheet generator from Soft School.  The only issue I have is that I have to remember to cut of the top before I photocopy because the words are printed at the top.  I left a list like that for a sub once - oops!

Once I started doing this, the test scores became all A's and B's - and my students are actually transferring the spelling skills into their writing!

What do you use for your spelling program?  Any other tips or advice?

PS - Don't forget to enter to win a $25 Teachers Pay Teachers Gift Card!  If your wish list is anything like mine, you can use all the help you can get in making a dent in it! LOL!