Keep them moving with Math!

Every other Thursday at my school is "Math Fact Day" in the primary grades.  The idea is that we spend an entire hour of math working toward mastering our math facts.  When I first started, I thought this sounded incredibly boring!!! I could take the easy way out and schedule the computer lab every other Thursday, but I like to keep this time fresh.  We have to get our kiddos to love math at a young age or they'll hate it forever! 

 

Today's goal was to keep my kiddos moving while they practiced their math facts!  It made the hour FLY by and my littles absolutely LOVED it! :) We started by playing math fact scoot!  I have a large class, so I broke them into two groups of 13 and had them "Scoot" around the floor in a circle :)

 

 

 

 

If you are unfamiliar with scoot, basically you give the kiddos an appropriate amount of time to solve a problem (any kind of problem!) and then shout "scoot!" or have a timer that *dings!* and then they move to the next one! For math fact day, I simply laid out flash cards and gave them a blank recording sheet. Easy Peasy!

 

Next up... My new FAVE game for these babies! THEY LOVED IT! :) We played "Find someone who" with Math Facts! We called it Mingle Math :) Basically, I gave the kids this paper which you can download by clicking! :)

 

 

Then, they each got a math fact smack dab on their shirt!  I used post-it notes because I have a gobzillion of them.  Avery labels would work great as well!  They had to wander the room looking for people who had the answers on their paper.  For example, if Johnny is wearing the math fact 4+5, then Tyler could write Johnny's name in the box which reads "9".  They LOVED being able to move around the room and I've never seen them so engaged in math fact practice! Check them out! :)

 

 

We, of course, are still working hard on our Geometry Unit!  This week we talked about Congruent Shapes!  We used my Two Peas in a Pod activity to do some whole class sorting.  They did a great job! :)

 

This activity is a part of my new Geometry Pack.  You can click HERE to see more!

 

We also made a very simple foldable.  This was our first attempt at making anything like this, they really enjoyed it and now they have a resource they can go back to as we continue learning and reviewing!

 

 

Didn't get a picture of the final product, but here was the start for a few of my kiddos!  Well that's it for me today! Come back soon to see what we've been up to during Readers Workshop! :) 

 

P.S. Three day weekend, YEAH! :)