Day 55- Word + Word = New word!

Can you guess what we worked on today? Compound words! I told my students that we were going to combine math and reading. We were going to add two words together to make one big word!

Well, my soldiers were not too excited about the prospect of doing two subjects in one, that was until I showed off my mad art skills! Check it out!

You know you're impressed! The kids really had trouble with the last one. I guess my butter didn't look like something they would want to eat!
After practicing making compound words, the kids went back to their seats with a cut and paste activity. I am pleased to announce that ALL of my soldiers did a wonderful job! I guess adding words was easier than they thought!
When I shared the lesson with Mrs. Hughes later in the day she suggested turning the words into math problems. For example foot has 4 letters and ball has 4 letters. Foot + ball = football, 8 letters! I can see this activity being a hit tomorrow!

Speaking of math, today we took our Unit 6 test. Now I haven't graded everyone's papers yet, but from what I saw when I was walking around, it looked like most of my soldiers were doing s good job! The main focus of this unit was helping students find adding and subtracting strategies that will work for them. Here are some of the adding strategies that my class came up with when we reviewed before the test.
Addition Strategies:
1. Use fingers
2. Use cubes or circle counters (any manipulatives)
3. Put the big number in your head and count up
4. Create a picture to match the problem and count

I told my students that they could use any of the strategies they listed during the test. It was interesting to see which student used which strategy while I was walking around the room. The only strategy I didn't see was the Make 10 strategy, which has the student making a 10 fact when solving a problem. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can watch a mini lesson about it HERE.

After the test we played a math game using dominoes. We played boys against girls and started easy. Just adding the dots and creating an addition sentence.

5+8=13

Once we got in the swing of making addition sentences, we graduated to turn around facts.

5+8=13

8+5=13

The answer didn't change, we just rearranged the numbers!

Next step, subtraction facts! This took a while to explain, even though we've done these before. 

5+8=13

Then students had to find the biggest number, since subtraction sentences start with the biggest number. Then students could choose either side to use as the number being subtracted. 

13-8=5

or 13-5=8

It was the girl's game up until the last domino was played. It was for 10 points, and the boys won by 1 student! The girls were good and congratulated the boys. I think we might play again tomorrow to give the girls a chance to tie things up.

I promised yesterday that I would get pictures of the wonderful charts my students created with Ms. Sanford. Here they are!

 Students used their 5 senses to describe Halloween. Then they had to put their answers in complete sentences. Today I had my students refer back to this chart when we went over our poems for the week. They had to find and circle words in the poem that were also on the chart.

Ms. Sanford reread the story of Hilda Hen and the students had to list what Hilda thought she saw, and what the objects really were.

The kids were excited to fill out our brain today! They pointed out that most of the brain is covered in math activities that we did. Hmmm, if I was a really good teacher I could have mentioned fractions and we could have created a fraction of how much of the brain covered math. Oh well, I'll be a really good teacher another day!

Our Daily Brain