Hello November!

Can we all just breathe a big sigh of relief for a second….aaaaaaaaaaah.  GOODBYE October.  I love a great themey month full of fun, but red ribbon week, parent teacher conferences, and report cards also come with October and I am thankful to be on the other side of that!  Whew!

So what’s up for November in our little room?! It’s time to break out the November math journal activities and Nutty for Numbers math centers up in here!  These are some of my favorites so I am jazzed to get them going again!

Along with the above units, I am just tickled camouflage to share my newest project!  We have a lot of military families in our school and area.   Now we can hit our standards hard while also honoring our heroes too! Veterans Day is November 11th.  We will begin some of this this week and will carry over to next week as well. 

This packet is designed to really hit the standards because this crucial part of the year feels like a tunnel into holiday madness.  The better I adhere to all academic business, the better we will be for it!

 I don’t know about you, but we need parts of speech practice day in and day out in first grade!  We will use the parts of speech to write descriptive and informative letters honoring veterans.

 I am pumped about our math lessons!  I plan to use these in our small group lessons first and then they will become math tubs for students to complete independently.  I really wanted to differentiate for small group so each lesson has explanations on how to differentiate for your small group yet still have the one learning objective.

 My students are getting the hang of related facts, so I think it is time to step it up a notch.  I have two sets of related number cards. Once students sort between related and not related, they will take the related facts and show how they are related.  For the groups that are ready, I will use numbers to 20.

You let me know on facebook, that you wanted more on place value.  Here’s the result!  We will use base ten blocks to build numbers.  Then we will roll a pocket dice cube and manipulate the number further.  If you don’t have pocket dice, students can pick a card out of a bag or you can just focus on one card until mastery. 

I have some students that struggle to see the patterns in the hundred twenty chart.  Well, they just plain struggle with number sense!  In an effort to help bridge the gaps in learning, I created hundred chart puzzles.  I have a variety of different objectives here.

 We can look at number order, odds and evens. skip counting, adding ten, subtracting ten, and number patterns leading to multiples in future years.

Cutting your charts up after laminating provides any level of puzzles for your students.  They love to see how the numbers are related and I find that this helps them make connections in order to understand greater than and less than.   To make things simpler, cut distinct patterns out and even color code them.  To make things more difficult, make more pieces and leave out the color coding. 

My little learners this year are not as capable in the skip counting area as they have been in the past.  Below, yellow ribbons provide a picture cue that they can count to get the next number.  I also made some count by cards without picture cues for those that are ready for the challenge! 

Another concept that we can never get enough practice with is story problems.  I opted to run on astrobrights and laminate so my students can do these in small group and at a math center over and over again for years.

 There’s more packed in this packet so if it meets your needs you can click the pictures to check it out!  It’s on sale for today! 

I had an exciting week last week and have a lot to share!  Be sure to check back soon for some fun more personal posts! 🙂 Have a great first week of November!