Day 35- Finding the "Differents"

Yes, I know 'differents' is not a word. I was going for a clever play on words. (differents and difference) Get it? Maybe not, but you will!

That was our topic of study in math; using the "Find the Difference" strategy for subtraction. I don't think this strategy will be the most popular one for my students, but it never hurts to know another way to do things!
I showed the students two sets of unifix cubes.

 I pointed out that some of the cubes had partners that were the same. But we didn't want the Sames! We want the Differents! So we slashed out the Sames.

 Once we slashed out the Sames, we looked at what was left- that is the Difference (or Differents)

So we popped off the extra cubes, the difference, counted them and we had our answer! The Difference between 10 and 6 is 4! 10-6=4.
After practicing this a few times, I changed my question. I stopped asking what the difference was, and started asking how many more the smaller number needed to be equal. The answer stayed the same, of course, but the students solved the problem by counting up instead of taking things away.

We also did more practice with Fact Families. We went to the carpet for that part of the lesson. I think my students like learning at the carpet. At least when I'm sitting on the carpet too. :)

Yesterday was Mrs. Overton's birthday! Mrs. Overton is our Assistant Principal, and her office just happens to be just across the hall from our classroom. We had to be very sneaky with our reading lesson today. We used the Birthday poem that Ms. Leahy gave us for this week, and the onomatopoeia lesson we had a few days ago, combined the two and had a mini birthday celebration!

We reread the poem for fluency, then went through it again and added "sound words" that we would hear is we were really making a birthday cake.

Crack- breaking eggs, glug-glug- pouring milk, chick-chick- cutting open the cake mix package, scrape- mixing the ingredients in the bowl, beep-beep- setting the timer, ding- timer going off, click, pop, swipe, scrape- opening icing and putting it on the cake, whoo- blowing out the candles.

We practiced reading it with the sound effects added, but the video did not show the kids to their best advantage. I think it would have gone better if we had actually made a cake while we read it. Now if only I could get an oven installed in the classroom before tomorrow...
We did get to do the art activity I had planned! We have lots of different cakes to surprise Mrs. Overton with tomorrow. And now, the best part of birthdays, besides the cake, the singing!

Reading centers today:

In social studies, we started filling in our Landform mini-books. We studies 20 landforms, but will only have 8 in our mini-book. I'm letting the students choose what we put in it, but everyone is doing the same ones. So far, we have volcano (of course), river, pond, and hill. Here are some of their illustrations.

 

 

 Tomorrow is not just the last school day of the month, or the last day of the school week, or the day that my students get to use their checks to buy my books, it's the first ever Teachers vs. Students Volleyball Game! The price of admission is $30 Cub Cash. The students who are playing have to at least be in 3rd grade (sorry, my students!) and have $50 Cub Cash to get to play. The special announcer for the game is.... ME!
I know absolutely NOTHING about volleyball, so this is going to be interesting! The game starts at 1:45!

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