Last night I held my first Family Math Night event. It was fabulous. I had 31 student Station Facilitators – the most ever. And every one of them did an amazing job. Here’s a photo of them right before we opened the doors. Can you find the principal in there? But what I really want to share with you are my upcoming What Do You Notice? posters. You get to see them before anyone else. Except for the first one…
I know it’s not quite spring yet but I’m a little anxious for it to start. It seems like it’s been a long winter. So, to encourage spring to get a move-on, I did a little spring cleaning. And that’s when I re-discovered my drawer full of rubber stamps and colorful stamp pads. These stamps and stamp pads were a staple in my third, fourth, and fifth grade classroom. And when I ran centers in K-2, I used them there,…
Get kids excited about science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) with this fun hands-on collaborative project. Typically done during a Family Math Night event, this project can also be done in the classroom. The best part is, each person is individually represented in the final product! Students will learn what makes a soccer ball through an introduction to 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional geometry. The lesson plan includes the mathematical background and useful vocabulary along with a link to the video…
Here’s my latest What Do You Notice? poster from a recent Family Math Night event. The nice thing about these posters is that they’re open-ended which allows for anyone to respond. For this one, I decided to make a venn diagram. But I didn’t draw the usual circles. Instead I drew two hexagons. This created the rhombus (parallelogram) in the center. The categories I used for the numbers were even numbers and multiples of 5. That said, anything appropriate would have…
I recently had a conversation with a friend about different ways to get her second graders to learn their addition and subtraction facts. She was looking for alternatives to flashcards. So I shared with her something I do with K-2 students called subitizing. Subitizing is being able to quickly recognize the number of objects in a small set without needing to count any of the objects. Think about rolling a die. When that die settles, a quick glance tells you…