Skip Counting

I found some strip puzzles that were a freebie last spring (can't remember where, or I'd give you the link) and my class really enjoyed doing them.  I printed them in black and white and let the kids glue them onto a blank page and colour them.  They were a pretty rowdy class, but they were happy to work on these for as long as I'd let them.  There were only 2 in the freebie and they kept asking if I would get more. Which made me think about making some. 

I have been busy setting up my Math centers so that we can get to working in small groups.  When I was looking through my files for activities to put into the Math drawers I found a set of puzzles on my computer that I must've started to make in the summer and them completely forgot about. 

I remember that I made them so my class could practice counting by 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, and 5's.  There are always some kids that have difficulty with skip counting and can use a fun review.  For those who need more of a challenge I started some of the puzzles at different numbers.  You can see below how the count-by-1's puzzle starts at 63.  My grade 2's have just started working on counting by 3's and 4's, and the grade 3's need to get these down pat because we'll soon be working on multiplication.

I put the finishing touches on them this morning and printed up the coloured versions.  They're going to the laminator so we can start using them tomorrow.  There are also black and white versions of each of the 7 puzzles so that I can photocopy them for ordering and colouring for an alternative or for early finishers.
There is a freebie puzzle in the preview file.   

I'm joining up today with Fern at Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday.  Head over there to get more great freebies.

Weigh Away

One thing that I find is that any kind of hands-on activity will keep kids engaged and be a popular center in the classroom.  That is why I've cut back the time my class spends on doing worksheets in Math to about 5-10 minutes and given them lots of time (45 minutes) to go to Math centers.  While they're there, of course, I'm with small groups, often working on similar or even the same type of assignment that they would've been doing if the worksheets were longer.

I needed a weighing center for Math a couple of years ago and couldn't find one that would suit my needs.  I wanted it to have a variety of different tasks for the kids to work through at their own pace.  I ended up making these task cards and they have become the best seller in my TpT shop.  (I thought I was just being too picky, but it looks like there was a niche in the market! Lol.)

There are 3 different activities included. The first is finding how many unifix cubes weigh 
the same as the given item.

The second is predicting which of 2 given items weighs more.  

The third is comparing objects to a given weight. I made two copies of these cards; one with ounces and the other with grams. 

Each of the 3 activities requires a prediction before weighing.   

I also made all the cards in black and white to save the pricey coloured ink. 

I set up the balance scales, along with all the items that they need for weighing.  All they have to do is grab a recording sheet and a few task cards and they're off and weighing.  They love it so much that I've had kids ask me if I could include it again when we switch out the centers.  I might have to make a second set! 

To look at Weigh Away in my store click here or on any picture of the task cards above. 

 
I'm joining Joanne at Head Over Heels for Teaching today for her Spark Student Motivation Saturday linky. 
Click to head over to pick up some great ideas for your classroom.

BTS Survey and Graphing activity

Even though the end of summer is approaching, I am loving August. The days are more mellow than July, the fresh fruit is in season, the garden is lush with produce, and we travel to Courtenay (one of my favourite spots on earth) on Vancouver Island to visit my mum and dad. 

This is a view of the Comox glacier much like I used to be able to see from our yard every clear day when I grew up. Now trees obscure the view in the summer. AND there is WAY less ice because the glacier has receded so much due to global warming. I heard that it's been predicted that it will completely disappear in around 35 years. 

I am linking up today (a tad tardily) with The Third Grade Zoo where Jessicca is sponsoring a BTS freebie/tips party. Click on her blog title to hop over and get some great ideas.

Last summer I made this BTS Meanwhile, I finished up this project. It's my BTS Survey Questions 
and graphing activity. I think your class will enjoy it as much as mine does. 

My class used it last fall and they begged me for more so I made up a bunch of others that they could use during Math center time throughout the school year. 

This package has four different questions. Here's a sample:

The other questions are How do you get to school, Which season do you like best? And What are the best kind of apples?

After they finish surveying their classmates they make a graph of the results. I wanted to make this so that beginning readers could do it so I included pictures as well as words for them to use on the survey question cards as well as the graphing activity.

Pick it up here for free (at least for a while). 

Grab and Guess freebie

I can't believe that it's Friday again. So soon!

I'm going to do a double link up this week with Fern from Teaching Blog Addict's FREEBIE FRIDAY.  

And Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday. 

 

 

It's been a busy week!  Last Friday we took the ferry from Nanaimo to Vancouver.  We thought we'd have to wait for the 10:45 sailing because it was looking pretty busy, but managed to get on the 8:30 ferry.  Amazing!  We drove into the terminal at 8:15 and pretty much straight on to the boat.
The scenery is beautiful.  This is a photo just as we were entering Horseshoe Bay on the Vancouver side.

My hubby had a meeting at 1:00 downtown, but we were there so early that we had time to stop in Stanley Park and go for a walk.  Stanley Park is a bit of heaven on earth.  In literally less than one minute you can go from a view like this:

to this:

Here I am near Siwash Rock (where a grey whale was spotted yesterday).

And later in Gastown, the oldest part of Vancouver, looking at the steam powered clock. 

 After we left Vancouver we drove to nearby Richmond to visit friends.  On Saturday they took us to Richmond's Marine Days celebration.  They have restored a lot of the waterfront there to what it was like 100 years ago.  There were little houses built on pilings over the water.

One of the most interesting belonged to a Japanese family.  The mother of the family, Asayo Murakami, had a very interesting history.  She came to Canada as a "picture bride" in 1924.  She had been married to a young man from a rich family, but failed to produce a male heir (she had two daughters and her third child, a boy, died shortly after he was born).  The family decided to get rid of her and sent her picture off to Canada where a Japanese worker in Vancouver agreed to pay her passage and marry her.  When she arrived in Vancouver she took one look at her prospective husband and refused to marry him, saying, "He wasn't my type, too short."  So she worked for two years picking strawberries and working in the cannery and other jobs to pay off her debt to him.  At the cannery she met the man she married and raised 10 children with.  The cannery is now a museum. Great gift shop!

Sadly at the start of  WW2 the family were interned in Alberta and never returned to B.C.  It is a regrettable chapter in our history, but the family came through it and prospered.
Mrs. Murakami lived to see many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.  She didn't tell her family about her daughters in Japan until she turned 100 years old in the late 1990's, but they were able to trace them.  Unfortunately one had died only a few years earlier, but the other came out to Canada to reunite with her mother and extended family.

©John Iuchi—Ms. Asayo Murakami on her 103rd birthday in Calgary, Alberta

The family has donated many family items to the heritage site in Richmond and have worked at restoring the beautiful garden in the yard.
I can't begin to imagine the heartbreak of losing an infant, then being sent away to a foreign land, never seeing my other two children and husband again (he was not in favour of sending her away because he loved her, but was overruled by his parents).
She lived to be 104!

Richmond has other attractions as well.  One of the best is an abundance of blueberry farms.  We picked up a 20 pound case (oh, oh - I'm supposed to be metric...).

Most of them went into the freezer, but I found a great recipe on the internet and made this fantastic cobbler for dinner on Tuesday evening. I love that the gluten-free included was delicious!

The link for it is HERE or in the picture.

LOL - my husband's aunt and uncle from Seattle are here for the summer and their 2 grandchildren came up to visit them for a week.  They are 10 and 12 years old and were having a great time playing with 3 of my grandkids.  When they all came over for supper all 5 of them were constantly comparing how they said and used different words (hence supper/dinner).  Pronouncing "about" was a particular topic of conversation!

When we got home the garden was BURSTING with tomatoes, cukes, zucchini, strawberries, eggplant, peppers and peaches! Hubby picked these goodies this evening.

Jack was DELIGHTED to see us when we got home on Sunday afternoon.

(If he doesn't look especially animated to you, please bear in mind that he's 87 and a half% basset hound) (and it was 100 degrees fahrenheit).
We had a great young couple stay to take care of the garden and look after Jack.  They gathered the pickling cukes and stored them in the fridge.  Yesterday was canning day.  21 quarts of dill pickles!

 

We don't go back to work until September 8th!!! after Labour Day.  It only happens this late every 7 years and I'm making the best of it.  In May when I was reading blogs about teachers being out for the summer already I was feeling pretty envious, but now.....not so much.  I'm spending some of my time "refreshing" some of the items in my TpT store.  Here are a couple:

See them in my TpT store by clicking on the pictures.
I've also been getting a bunch of items finished that have been sitting partly done for quite a while now.  No big projects (although I'm working on units for Guided Math which I'm pretty excited about), but I got these three done.  The first is Apple themed task cards with activities:  addition to 8 and odd and even.  I was making them for my firsties last year (I had yukky hand made ones that they were using in Math centers) and now I'll be teaching two's and three's!
Click on the picture to get it from my TpT store.

A second Math center activity that I finished is the FREEBIE this week.  Also made for my firsties and not finished!  I've used this activity in my Math centers for years (again they used the not-so-beautiful hand done version, but they didn't seem to notice at all!)
I put out my tubs of manipulatives and they grab a handful, estimate how many, then count them.  Super simple!  Super popular.  The FREEBIE includes 2 recording sheets:  one where I listed the manipulatives I have in my classroom for them to use, and a blank that you can fill in if yours are different.  If you are anal picky about hand done printing you could take a screen shot of it after you download it and paste in text boxes.  LOL!

Math center activities and freebies

I love following Favorite Things linky with Teaching Trio on the first Wednesday of the month. I get so many ideas that I can use in my classroom.

                                       

I've been thinking about Math a lot this summer so I'm going to share my three of my favourite (spelled in Canadian, eh?) Math center activities. Don't forget to click on the pictures of the activities to get the 2 freebies. 

                                   

#1. The first is from Sara Ventrella at MissV's Busy Bees. And it is a very generous freebie that is always a hit with my students. It is fun to see them measuring around the classroom and out into the hall!

#2. The second is one I made myself. It is a favourite in my classroom and the bestselling product that I have in . This set of weighing task cards has 3 types of weighing activities that the students do using a balance scale.  They include finding objects that weigh the same, finding if 

an object weighs more than a given weight, and finding which of two given sets of objects weighs more. Students are asked to predict and record their answer before weighing.  Click 

HERE or on the first picture to check it out. 

                                         

                           

#3. Finally this data collection and graphing activity is another popular activity during Math center time. Students survey their classmates then make a graph of their results. They enjoy it so much that I have made a bunch of different seasonal ones that are in my store. The beauty of having an activity that is similar in the centers over the course of the year is that the stdents are already familiar with it so you don't have to teach them how to do a new activity when you switch out your stations. 

I have this Back to School set available in my TpT store as a limited time freebie right now so click a picture to grab it now.