Deep In The Heart of Texas Blog Hop!!

Welcome to the "Deep in the Heart of Texas" blog hop!  Over 40 Texas teacher bloggers have joined together to share what we love about our state as well as ideas and freebies that we love.  You will also have the opportunity to enter to win TPT products and/or TPT gift certificates by entering using the rafflecopters included in each post.  Down at the bottom, you will see all of the blogs participating in the hop.  Just click and you will be taken to their posts.  We hope you love what you find.  Happy Valentine's Day!

Let's get this party started!!  I'm Katie and I am a born and bred Texas girl!  I am originally from Houston and that's where most of my family still lives.  I moved to Austin for college (Hook 'em Horns!) and have been here ever since!!  Been here over 10 years now, so I think that makes me an official Austinite!!

Austin is such a great place to live!!  It has everything we need but doesn't feel like a big huge town yet!  I say 'yet' because we are going through some major growing pains right now!  Traffic is getting worse as more and more people move to Austin each day!  It's still a great place to be though- great weather, live music, lots of outdoor places to explore and some awesome restaurants!!!

I used to say I didn't like teaching math, but now it's my favorite part of the day!! I'm a big fan of Guided Math and use that model in my 2nd grade classroom.  You can read more about how I use Guided Math in my classroom in this blog post.

I have a fun math product in my store called All About Me Math.  It's a fun activity to do either at the beginning of the year or at the end of the year, as a great way for your students to see how many numbers they have in their lives!  You can check it out in my store and then enter to win a copy in one of the giveaways below!!

Here's a fun freebie from my store for you- my Number Sense Activity Pages.  These are super fun cut and paste activities that my kiddos LOVE!  Perfect for a math center!!

Click on these pictures to go straight to my store-

 

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Click on the buttons below to visit some other awesome Texas bloggers!

An InLinkz Link-up

Guided Math in detail!

Well, first of all, let me say Happy New Year!!!!  I hope y'all had a safe New Year's Eve- I was cozy under a blanket watching the second Hobbit movie: exciting, I know!!

I also hope y'all have had an enjoyable Christmas break!  I know I have!!!  Lots of fun family time and lots of Netflix and naps as well!  I'm almost 7 months pregnant now, so it's been nice to relax and spend quality time with my husband and my family.  We have been working on the baby's room (and when I say we, I mean mostly my husband) and everything's still all over the place, which is making us both a little crazy!!  We're making good progress though and are taking advantage of the last few days of break to get it as close to finished as possible!

I wanted to share a little about how I use Guided Math in my classroom.  I've been meaning to do a blog post about this for a long time, but just haven't gotten around to it until now!

I love Guided Math and have been using some form of it for about 7 years now.  When I first arrived at my current school, we taught math in Whole Group only and used our giant student workbooks as our pacing guide.  It was miserable trying to run from desk to desk to make sure that everyone was on the correct page and this was before I had a document camera and projector installed in my classroom!  I remember saying, "Ok, find blue number two," and then going all around to make sure my little sweet first graders were actually on blue number two.  Whew!

Then came Guided Math (and eventually a projector!) and everything changed.  I finally felt like I was actually teaching math to each and every one of my students.  I introduced Math Centers (Workstations) and they LOVED them!!  There is so much learning going on and they just think they are playing math games!  Math is now my favorite part of the day, hands down.

Please feel free to leave me any comments or questions you have in the comments section of this post.  I hope this gives you insight about how wonderful Math time can be in any classroom and I really hope you find something helpful!

*edited to add more detail about my Math Journal time-

I love using the 4 box system.  It's really easy for the kids to get used to as a daily routine.  At the beginning of the year, I introduce just the first two boxes.  We do them together each day and then I give them time to practice some math workstation games.  As the days go on, I add the third box and start to leave blanks in the first two boxes.  Then we add the fourth box and eventually build up to them doing the entire thing independently.  Once they get going, it is SILENT during that time and I love it!  :)

I have always done handwritten journals, but I recently started making them on my computer and trying to get 5 at a time done for the upcoming week.  I just print and post that copy on the document camera and they do the work in their Math Journal spiral notebook.  They come show me when they are done and I quickly check for any major errors.  Then they go to their workstation and we check their journal together after I'm done pulling groups.  Here are some more pictures-

Fun math game for test review!!

Hi Friends!

I can't believe it's already November!!  Time is flying by!

We are getting ready for our second District Assessment in Math and are using a fun review game this week.  We are still working on subtraction with borrowing in whole group (which really means I'm pulling my hair out as we try to understand it), but we did this review game for about 30 minutes today and the kids LOVED it!!  We're doing it again tomorrow and Wednesday and then our DA is on Thursday!!

I used review questions that our math coach gave us and gave a sheet to each pair of students.  Each pair worked through the first question and then brought it to me to check. 

 Once they had the correct answer, they got to write their name underneath one of the pumpkin sheets I had taped to the board.  Then they did the same for the two other story problems.  On the back of each pumpkin was a post-it note with a point value, but no one knew what each pumpkin was worth.  They got to pick any pumpkin each time, not knowing what points they might earn.  Once we checked all of the problems, I flipped the pumpkins over and they were so excited to see the points revealed!!  Next, we counted up the points that each team earned in each round.  Since we had three problems, each team earned three different point values, so we got to tie in a little multi-digit addition as well!

It was a lot of fun and they were TOTALLY engaged the entire time!!  Definitely going to adapt this game to review for all of our future DAs!!

What do you do to make test review fun?

How's November going for you??  Would love to hear from you!

Sunday Scoop!

Wow, looking at the date of my last post is kind of embarrassing!!  More than a month ago- whoops!!  I'm popping in today with a quick post, but have lots of other great things I hope to post soon!!

I'm linking up with The Teaching Trio today to join their Sunday Scoop linky!

We have Friday off and I'm headed to Houston to visit family, so it should be a great week/weekend.  It's also our Red Ribbon week, so we get to dress up each day- woo hoo!

Be sure to link up with The Teaching Trio and share what you've got going on!!

Sharing a super fun math activity!!

Hi Friends!!

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. 

Once they counted their total, I recorded each one on the board and then we found our class total.  We did this every day and graphed our results.  When we grouped all of the cubes, we started to see that the numbers were larger and it was easier to count by tens and ones. 

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?