"Peep"in at Equal Equations

I don't know about your little darlin's, but mine needed so much practice on the core concept "Understand the meaning of the equal sign, and determine if equations involving addition and subtraction are true." So I came up with this activity. Students choose a card from the pile and place it on their game board. The student who gets five in a row horizontally, vertically, or diagonally wins. There is one target number and four different (2 addition and 2 subtraction) equations that equal that target number. Students need to be strategic about where they place their cards on the game board. After they get five in a row, they can record their equations on the recording sheet. There are two different versions of recording sheet so students are exposed to seeing the equations written both ways. Click on the first picture below if your students need more practice with this concept. 

Enjoy!

Don't Eat Pete Valentine Style Freebie

Little darlin's LOVE this silly little game of "Don't Eat Pete." I made this one just in time for Valentine's Day. Enjoy! Click on picture below. If you are interested in more "Don't Eat Pete" games. You can find a Christmas version here.

A Classroom Update and Some Freebies

So we have been working really hard on Daily 5 in our classroom. And it is up and running. Can I just say, that I. LOVE. DAILY. 5!!! To think that I suffered through the last 10 years doing busy centers (for me and the students), makes me cringe. I wish I would have found Daily 5 much sooner. Oh, well, that's the way the pencil writes, I guess! Daily 5 has been a true blessing. There is little to no management issues, the students love the different rotations and looking on the board each day, to see what they'll be doing. I've had to monitor and adjust D5 for it to work in my class, but nonetheless, it works. If you are thinking about doing it, DO IT!!  In our class, the students do 3 rotations every day. One of those rotations is "Read to Self." I've added Guided Reading onto my board as well. We do 3 twenty-minute sessions. We do our "Work on Writing" rotation as a class. This group of students absolutely LOVE to write! That makes me so excited and happy. Below are the pictures I use for our D5 board. You can click on the picture if you're interested in downloading.

Something else we've been working on in our classroom is Geometric Shapes. I created a little Shapes Concentration/Memory Game. My team member used it yesterday in her class and absolutely loved it because the students have to match the shape word with a real-life picture of the shape. If you'd like a copy, please click on the picture below.

Person, Place, Thing, or Animal Game Freebie

This week in our literacy block, we are learning about nouns and the different kinds of nouns there are. So I decided it might be fun to make a little game out of it for the little darlin's. You may download for free by clicking on the picture. Enjoy!

Syllable Singing

Tomorrow we will finish our testing -- Yahoo!! In between testing, we have played some really fun games. This game is called Syllable Singing -- one person leaves the room, and they are "it." The rest of the class decides on a word with 3 or more syllables. Depending on how many syllables the word has, you need to split the class into that many groups and each group says a syllable of the word. For instance, if the word was October, one group will say "Oc" the next group will say "to" and the third group will say "ber." Then when the "it" person comes back in, the class begins to sing their part of the word to a familiar tune like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." The "it" student needs to listen to everyone and see if they can figure out what the word is. My little darlin's loved this game!

3 Corners -- An R-Controlled Word Review Game

Next week is testing, so we've been hitting the review road heavily the last couple of weeks. A fun game to play with your little darlin's is called 3 Corners. This game is easily adaptable for just about any concept. We played it to review R-Controlled words. So here's how to play...in one corner you post "ar" in another corner, post "or" and in the third corner post "er," "ir," and "ur." I give my students 5 seconds to find a corner they want. Once they are all in a corner, you call out a word, for example "corn." The students check themselves to see what corner they are in. If anyone is in the "or" corner, they have to go sit down. My students wanted to keep playing and playing. What I like about this game is that it gets the students moving around, they have to self check to see if are out or not. Yeah, I know, you'll have those students who will just follow the crowd, but overall it's a great way to review. And for those little strugglers, they can gain some confidence if they are just following the crowd.