Math Games: Helping Students Remember

Hi, this is Brandi, from The Research Based Classroom. I love to use math games for fact fluency practice but I get impatient with students constantly asking me what games they can play or how to play.  It's taken me years to come up with a good solution, but I love this. I just snap a picture of the game when it's all set up and students are playing it. Then I post the picture with the name of the game on the wall. Simple. Students can then look on the wall to not only see what games they can play, but it also gives them a quick reminder of how to play.  It also helps me remember how each game is played from year to year. And best of all....far less questions.

January Ideas for Interactive Writing

Hello, this is Brandi from The Research Based Classroom. I know it's not even Christmas yet, but now that I'm done with Christmas in the classroom, it's time to start planning for January. I am a huge fan of interactive writing for the K-2 classroom and today I am sharing some of my favorite January writing ideas. First, a quick look at how I implement interactive writing.

• I like to plan 4 days a week for writing and I give it about 15 minutes each day.
• Everyone writes the text on their own paper while we write on the class paper. I put the class paper on the easel and everyone else writes on their own paper. I know lots of teachers who have students write on whiteboards, but I like my students to have a finished text that they can take home and read to their family. Choose what works best for you.
• Every student writes on the class paper. At the beginning of the year in first grade it might be one letter at a time, but by the end of the year it's a whole word at a time. So it's important to write longer texts as the year moves along.
• We compose the text together. Students make suggestions and we work together to decide what we will write. Many of the decisions are made by a quick vote.
• You can teach any writing skill with interactive writing. Decide what to focus on by what you see that your students need. Use interactive writing as a time to teach skills your students need for their independent writing. Here's a small list of skills that can be taught:

You can write about any topic, but here are some of my favorite January topics:

• Directions for building a snowman
• New Year's Resolutions for the class
  
• Penguin or Polar Bear Facts
• A biography or list of facts about Martin Luther King Jr.
• Create a list of things that good readers or writers do
• Create a list of rainy day activities
• Write about snowflakes after reading Snowflake Bentley
• Read the story of Ruby Bridges and retell her story

Add caption

If you are looking for ideas for other months, you can find these ideas and more in my Interactive Writing for Grades K-2 download at TpT.

Happy Writing!

Student-Created Math Word Walls

Hi, this is Brandi from The Research Based Classroom. Last year I spend a ton of time creating a really great math word wall for my first grade classroom, only to find myself moving up to fifth grade. It looks like this:

When I switched to fifth grade for this school year, I thought I would start making a new math word wall. I brought home my current math books, found old math books, started to search the internet for lists of math vocabulary words for fifth grade and I got overwhelmed with the number of math vocabulary words I would need to do. Not overwhelmed and not tackling this, but more overwhelmed and feeling like my first year in fifth grade has other more important things I need to spend my time on first. So I stopped working on creating a list of words. I still decided to go ahead and put up a math word wall, but I thought I would work on it as we went. Adding the word wall cards a few at a time. I thought by the end of the year, my entire word wall would be complete. Not my best idea. Mostly because I don't own a color printer and running down to the copy store to print one or two cards at a time is quite frankly something I will never do. You have no idea how long it takes me to run to the post office for a stamp! Now here I am at the end of the first term and my word wall is still sitting completely empty. I was lamenting my decision to even put up the word wall when I finally got a good idea. I think it's even a great idea: Why not let my fifth graders create the word wall themselves?

I assigned small groups of 2-3 students one word and they made a mock up of their vocabulary card. These are all words we have already learned in class. I used mostly properties we have worked with or words that go with basic operations. While they wrote their definitions to create their mock up, I went around and helped groups refine some of their definitions. It was a challenge for some of the groups to come up with good definitions even when they were sure they knew the math behind the property. Here are some of the word wall cards they came up with:

I just couldn't bring myself to ask the associative property of addition group to rewrite their examples so that they could keep the numbers in the same order and just change the groupings. I thought it was right on their mock up, but the final product shown here has the numbers moved around. 

 I also wish I had put more emphasis on the name of the property here. Maybe I should have gotten them to write Distributive Property of Multiplication over Addition. But even still, they did a fabulous job and we are now on our way to creating our math word wall together. It was a good learning experience. I hadn't realized how hard it would be for the students to verbalize definitions, it took a lot of discussion for us to agree on how the definitions should be stated and to make sure that everyone understood what each definition meant. Just for the refining of our thinking, this endeavor was worth it. I know this won't work with all grades, but for the upper grades, it just might be better to let them do it themselves.

Thanks for stopping by. 

P.S. If you are interested in my Math Word Wall for Grades 1 and 2, you can find the original and the printer friendly versions at TpT.

A Quest for Apps

Hi, this is Brandi from The Research Based Classroom. One thing I didn't think much about when I decided to move from first to fifth was resetting up my iPads. So I started on a quest to find some great apps for fifth grade. It was a little harder than I thought it would be. First off, when looking for apps for first grade I found a great blog called Best Math Apps and Websites for PreK, Kindergarten, First Grade and Second Grade. I found some great things for first grade there. You can see a blogpost I wrote about some of my favorite math apps I found on the site here. I really thought I would find something like that for fifth grade... but no such luck. However, I did find some really great free apps that I want to share with you.

Did you know that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) makes apps? Free apps!

1. Pick-a-Path: Uses powers of ten, negative numbers, fractions, decimals and more. 7 different levels each with 7 different puzzles.
2. Equivalent Fractions: Create equivalent fractions and match them to their location on a number line.
3. Math Concentration: Play alone or with a partner to match whole numbers, shapes, fractions or multiplication facts to equivalent representations.
4. Deep Sea Duel: Play alone or with a partner to collect numbers that will reach a specified sum. This game not only has 10 levels, but it gets harder as you become more successful. It also has a negative rational number option.

The Math Learning Center has some great electronic manipulatives too. Also all for free.

1. Number Rack: This app is probably more for younger grades, but I'm leaving it on the iPad. You never know. It is a virtual Rekenrek, which is my favorite math tool in first grade.
2. Geoboard: Think perimeter, area, fractions, angles & more!
3. Number Pieces Basic and Number Pieces: These two apps use base ten pieces. Students can also record and label their thinking and work on the app. Number Pieces is the more advanced version and it has additional features for representing larger numbers, and for multiplication, and division.
4. Number Line: Visualize number sequences and model strategies for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
5. Number Frames: At first I thought this was more for lower grades. But custom frames can be made to help visualize factors, products, fractional parts & more.
6. Pattern Shapes: Explore fractions and geometry in a multitude of ways.

Pattern Shapes

Number Line

Number Pieces

Number Pieces

My quest isn't over yet, I'm still looking for some great apps. I'd love to hear about your favorite apps!

Building Mathematical Flexibility with the Math Rack

Hi, this is Brandi, from The Research Based Classroom. Do you teach kindergarten or first grade? Are you constantly trying to build mathematical flexibility? Whether you call it a Rekenrek or a Math Rack, you have to try this tool.

A rekenrek (wreck in wreck) is a Dutch math tool that uses two sets of ten beads. Each set of ten is made from five red and five white beads. Just the format alone helps students to start thinking about groups of five and ten. The large rack shown above comes with a removable cover so you can "hide" beads behind it.

I started with this tool by just letting the students explore and talk about the characteristics of the tool itself. Then using only one bar of the math rack I ask students to tell me how many beads they see. Learning to subitize the five and ten is a huge skill for five and six year olds and it takes some time before I start telling addition and subtraction stories. Putting the math into context through story problems helps young mathematicians make sense of the operation you are asking them to do. Later in the year as my students become proficient within ten, I move toward using both rows of beads to work with numbers up to 20.

What I found to be really great with this tool is the number of addition and subtraction strategies that my students discovered themselves and then taught to each other. The math talk is so important for this. They were counting up, counting on, doubling, halving, making ten, using doubles plus one and so on. Every strategy I used to teach was discovered by the students themselves and then taught to each other. As they became more flexible with their numbers, the discussions became more precise and I gradually increased the difficulty. At the beginning of the year I used this tool every single day for 5 to 10 minutes. Now that we are at the end of the year I'm still using it every single week.  Give it a try and you'll love it. My only disappointment is that I didn't find this tool years ago.

My young mathematicians also use student size math racks for working with partners or individually.

And they use the free app version.

My full size Math Rack at Math Learning Center is available here. They also have a free guide to using the Rekenrek here. And you can get the free app for the iPad or the web app for browsers here. The small student size rack is available here.  And a great definition of subitizing  can be found here.

Reinforcing Place Value Understanding with Young Mathematicians

Hi, this is Brandi from The Research Based Classroom and I'm excited to join the lineup of bloggers here at Who's Who. This past week we did a little bit of a scoot, with a little bit of sugar, to create a fun practice for helping to solidify our understanding of place value. I just call it Skittle Math. Since I'm teaching first grade right now, the numbers aren't very high and that keeps the sugar levels a bit lower too. You could easily do this with any small candy. I chose Skittles, because they don't even tempt me. Had this been M-n-M's I would have been in trouble!

You will need paper plates or paper towels, popsicle sticks, a bag of candy and a container of frosting.

Give each student a portion cup of candy. Don't count - just pour the candy in. It's better if you get a variety of numbers so try to make some less full and others more full. The students used a popsicle stick to spread the frosting onto another popsicle stick in order to "glue" their bundles of ten together. Yes, it would be less messy to have students use squeezable frosting, but I wanted everyone to be able to do this at the same time and I didn't want to buy multiple containers of frosting. So I just put frosting into bowls for groups of students to use and they spread it with a popsicle stick.

Each group of ten candies must be bundled onto a popsicle stick to make a stick of ten.

This student has 1 ten and 9 ones.

After everyone had their Skittles organized into tens and ones, we scooted around to practice counting, sketching and recording the number of candies that our classmates had.

Click on the picture to grab a copy of my student record sheet.

This is a pretty easy practice that my students thought was a blast. Plus I love that they get to move around while they are practicing counting and sketching double digit numbers. And for the fast finishers, I had them flip their paper over and just keep going until everyone finished their work. Thanks for stopping by to read this post. You can also find me at: