Happy Friday!
We are so excited to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for our first Five for Friday! Being our first full week of school, we have had a lot of exciting things happen!
My students earned all of their brownie points this week! Their prize, of course, was homemade brownies! I may or may not have taste tested quite a few of them...and my husband may or may not have eaten all of the leftovers. Oops!
We both use brownie points in our classroom as a whole class incentive. They work together to earn brownies by following directions, walking quietly in the hall, earning compliments from other teachers, and just about anything else that we find impressive. :) Find the download of the brownies here from Mrs. Heeren's Happenings.
We have been working on place value this week in math. I LOVE teaching math! We have been focusing on standard, expanded, and word forms this week, as well as base-10 blocks. My students really enjoyed completing this task card activity. The best part is that it is differentiated!
Click here to find these task card on TpT.
One super exciting thing that happened this week is that my new Lilly Pulitzer dress came in! It was from the after party sale since a teacher's salary obviously doesn't cut it when it comes to full price Lilly. I am in love with this dress!
Going back to teaching math and place value, our school just adopted the Math Expressions series. Even though we have had some training, we are struggling with it! Virginia is not a Common Core state, and the book seems to align more with Common Core than our Standards of Learning. We have heard of other schools having great success with this series, so we would LOVE some tips on how to best use this series with our classes.
And finally...I finished month 2 of Chalean Extreme this week! I love this program so much, but I need to find the motivation to start month 3. I assume it's not just me who wants to do absolutely nothing except for sit on the couch after getting home from school, especially during the first full week with students!
Make sure you head over to Doodle Bugs Teaching to find more Five for Friday posts!
Hi Ladies!
ReplyDeleteI used Math Expressions for 3-4 years. I used it in the state of Washington which is a Common Core state but I taught in Virginia for the 8 years previous to moving to Washington. I'd be happy to share my thoughts and strategies I used for using the curriculum. Email is probably the easiest way to communicate further. You can email me at liveloveserveteach@gmail.com and I'd love to chat.
Joya :)
We just e-mailed you! Thank you so much!
DeleteWe have used Math Expressions for years now-- I think 3-4 for the Common Core version and 2-3 for the previous version. We are blended classrooms so we use the text a little bit differently. Basically, kids take a pretest each unit and then do the lessons and other activities for just the skills they need to work on. I think you could do this by subtracting/ adding skills to align to your standards.
ReplyDeleteI do like some of the visuals they use for word problems-- break apart problems and comparison bars. It's helpful for kids to have this way of making word problems more concrete.
My Bright Blue House
I like the pretest idea! That would cut down on having too much unnecessary fluff in our lessons. Thank you for sharing!
DeleteI had to check out your blog after you said ours were similar colors! Yours is so cute! I love the bright pinks with the gold glitter!! My class has Brownie Points too, but we use it for extra practice or other work that I we just didn't get to through the week. They each have a Brownie Points box with work that can be differentiated. It's basically an early finisher box! Enjoy your break!
ReplyDelete