Monday Math ~ Fact Families

Happy Monday!  I thought I would quickly share some fun math resources for teaching fact families that I found recently!  As you may already know, I love www.TeacherTipster.com, so it will come as no surprise that I found yet another awesome tip on his website.  This video is made for teachers to watch and shows us an interesting way to teach students how fact families work.

Watch the video, but it basically using the color wheel as a way to explain the reciprocal property.  The idea is to use student's knowledge how they can mix primary colors to get secondary colors; yellow + blue = green just as blue + yellow will also equal green and if you could magically take the blue out of the color green you would be left with the color yellow...  Again, watch the video because he does a better job at explaining it than I am but I tried this lesson with my class as a way to introduce fact families and they LOVED it!

Now the next video is a cute puppet show that is made to show directly to students.  Krys and Kai's Math Minute Fact Families is about 9 minutes long and is a great mini lesson between the teacher and a cute blue puppet.  There are other videos made by Krys Tina which look promising but I have only used the fact family one so far!  

My last fact family share is from Teachers Pay Teachers and is a great freebie made by Beverly Clore.  Check out her Fact Families Unit, it has fact family worksheets, addition and subtraction practice pages and some crayon themed math center/station activities.

As always, thanks for stopping by! Please leave a comment and let me know some of the fun ways that you teach fact families!

A few great point of view books

Hi there!  This week in class we have been working on understanding point of view.  I have found a few fun books that seem to really engage my students while clearly showing them point of view.
The first series of books are the Chester books from Melanie Watt.

The Chester series of books features a rascally cat named Chester who battles with the author Melanie Watt to turn her stories into books all about him.  He uses a red marker to scribble over her typed words and they battle back and forth in the most humorous way.  My students have loved every one of her Chester stories.  

After we read a few of the the Chester books we tried our hands at being "Chester-like".  Students used  a book that I wrote about my dog Dewey and had the best time scribbling all over the pages as they changed the story to be about another character (some created their own Chester story and others used their pets as inspiration.)

Check out my Chester Point of View Activities over in my TPT store.

I found another fun book for teaching point of view in a comical way!  A is for Musk Ox  by Erin Cabatingan is a super funny book where a musk ox hijacks an alphabet book from a zebra.  I found a fun alphabet book on www.enchantedlearning.com and students had to turn the plain old alphabet book into an alphabet book that was all about them. It was a nice point of view follow up activity and it was great adjective practice for them.

I just love finding new mentor texts.  What other books do you use to teach point of view??

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I can not believe it is March already.  The weather here is not cooperating and we are having yet another snow storm today!  It's crazy!

I'm sorry I have not blogged in so long!  My Dad got really sick at the end of December and that totally threw me off my schedule.

Thankfully, after almost a month of hospitals and rehab, he is mostly recovered and getting stronger everyday!  

School has been crazy too, especially since we have a had 9 snow days!!  I mean, I like snow days as much as the next kid but 9?  At this rate I am afraid we will be in school until July!


Anyway, Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!  I hope you have some fun things planned for your class!  We are reading one of my favorite St. Patrick's Day Stories, The Luckiest Leprechaun!  What a cute story about the friendship between a cranky old leprechaun and a scroungy dog!

Usually, a leprechaun makes his way into our classroom  and leaves a few signs of his mischievous visit.  He leaves  some cute little green footprints, scatters chairs, books and leaves use a hidden pot of gold (Rolos).


We will also be doing some fun word work activities from my Word Work Unit for St. Patrick's Day, Easter and Spring.  Usually our word work consists of a weekly list of 1st grade word wall words where they practice spelling them and using them in sentences but sometimes I like to switch it up for them and give them some extra word work with a fun theme.  They love it; they especially love creating words using the letters from other words.  How many words can you make using the letters in Saint Patrick's Day?  I have other theme word word packs in my TPT store, feel free to hop over and check them out!

Here is a fun math Freebie from my TPT store! It's a place value matching worksheet where students match up the place value clues to the matching shamrock. There are two versions; numbers to 120 and a challenge with numbers to 250.

What fun things are you all going to do to celebrate the holiday?