The 100th Day!

Wow!  I can't believe the 100th day is here already!  I usually have so many things I want to squeeze in, but my three boys all had the Boy Scout Derby car races this past weekend, plus we went to a birthday party, so it kind of just snuck up on me!  So I am planning on doing the old reliable activities for math that I know are fun, and that work every year.  I thought I would share them with you in case you wanted something to change up your routine...

We will be studying money this coming week, so I usually have my class use the plastic coins in our math series to make 100 cents.  We then record these ways on printable piggy banks to make a bulletin board display.  I have uploaded the printable to my TPT store...

I also like to do an estimation activity using boxes of paper clips.  I get 5-6 boxes of the small paper clips which come in boxes of 100 (no counting for me!) and I have my students group up and make an estimate (using yarn) for how long they think a small paper clip chain will be.  We then tape their estimates down to the floor and I let them link their 100 paper clips in a chain to see how close they were.  The winning group gets to take home the paper clip links.  We also do an extension activity using one box of the larger paper clips to see if the students understand the idea that although there are the same number of paper clips, the length will be longer...I usually keep those paperclips because they are my favorite!

Well, those are my two favorite activities that don't take a whole lot of planning, but result in a lot of learning and problem solving.  Happy 100th Day everyone!!!

New Year's Graphing

I have finalized my plans for the week back for New Year's math.  On Wednesay we are going to make a pictograph of the kinds of gifts our favorite gifts were...electronics, toys, books, movies, games, other.  On Thursday we are going to make a bar graph where we were at when the New Year came...I am going to let the kids make the tabs, but I thought we would start with in bed, at home and at a friends.  I am also going to poll the teachers in our school and let the kids compare the results for our class and the school's teachers.  On Friday were are going to do a larger graph on the Smart Board of what we were doing when the New Year came...such as sleeping, eating, dancing, talking and make a class graph.  I am going to give each student a smaller version of the blank graph and we are going to go to the playground and poll 23 students each and make a tally graph of their responses.  When we come back together we will create bar graphs from the tally graphs and compare the results of each of our polls.  Some vocabulary we will be discussing are bar graph, tally graph, compare, contrast, poll and results. 

Sorry...no pics, but if you would like copies of the masters I have made, please leave me your email in the comment box and I will send them to you!