I hope you are enjoying your Labor Day holiday! I've been relaxing in my pajamas all morning, doing a little math planning for the next few weeks. I'm just popping in to share a fun math activity we did this past week!!
We are starting off the year with foundations of numbers and are diving in with Place Value and Number Representations for the first two weeks of school! My new 2nd grade team told me about this game they've used before and we did it each day this past week. We called it The Pocket Game.
You start out by giving each table linking cubes. Each student puts one cube in each of their pockets. This can be jeans, shirts, jackets, shorts- as long as it's a pocket, they put a cube in!
Have them put the extra cubes away so they don't get mixed up. Then have them take the cubes out of their pockets and put them together for each table group, telling them you need to know how many pockets their group has. This is a place value game, so the goal is to get the kids grouping the cubes in different ways and talking about how they did it. On Monday, I didn't give them any guidance and just asked them to find out how many pockets their group had. It was really fun to see they way the different students counted. Plenty counted by ones, and a few even counted by twos.
It was really great to hear the math conversations going on as we did this activity each day. As we went on and had our other math lessons throughout the week, most of the groups were eventually putting their cubes together and counting by tens. We also played Compare in groups to keep practicing counting tens and ones. My kids love playing this game!!
I didn't take a picture of our completed graph, but it was a great week of Math! We've also been talking about Number Representations and going over the different forms of numbers. Today I made these to help with expanded form! Can't wait to show them tomorrow!
How has your first few days/weeks of school been so far?
