I won't even begin to waste time saying how long it's been since I last blogged or explaining why. In a nutshell, being a full-time mom and full-time teacher is a "full time" job. Who knew?! :) Even though my daughter is almost a year old, (seriously?!) doing the working mom thing is still not easy for me. I don't think it ever will be. I struggle with it...a lot. Those of you that make it "look" easy... I'm in awe!
Truth be told, there are STILL more mornings than I'd like to admit that I cry on the way to work and every afternoon is a struggle between wanting to run home to my family and staying at work just "5 minutes longer" to get things ready for the next day.
Having said that, there are still moments every day that I LOVE my job and know that I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I seriously miss blogging more and I know that eventually I will find my way back on a more regular basis, but for now I'm not going to worry about it and just blog and share when I can (like when I get 2 snow days in a row! yippee!).
This girl gets her "love" of cold weather from her momma, I do believe!
But we did enjoy our snow days for extra cuddling! How is she 11 months old already?
If you follow me on Instagram, then you already saw the obscene amount of candy hearts we used last week! Seriously...these things taste disgusting so I KNOW teachers are the only people keeping the lights on in the candy heart factories. Am I right?
We did probability, estimation, graphing, place value, and dissolving experiments with our matter unit so I got my money's worth out of the hearts! I kept some "clean" for the kids to eat and we just used the rest for all of our activities.
Every year, some kids struggle with the one more/one less/ten more/ten less concept. Since we are a little (gasp!) ahead in math this year as of now, I wanted to incorporate candy hearts into some extra practice. I found these little dressing cups at Target (100 of them for 1.99!) and pre-made groups of ten to use. We use ten frames and base ten blocks all.the.time. and I just like for them to see these important concepts in a lot of different ways.
Plus...I am a firm believer that a little novelty goes a long way!
By the way...We are not playing Race to 100, I just accidentally pulled these mats out instead of my regular place value ones! Pretty sure the ones pictured are from Cara Carroll's fabulous place value unit.
This activity made it easier to "talk" math and see who was still struggling because we could say "Do we need to change the number of CUPS or the number of hearts?" I even had a few inquisitive minds ask if they could count the hearts in their cups to MAKE SURE there were 10 in each one. Sheesh...it's like they've seen me make mistakes before or something. ;) I also made one large tupperware container with ten of the "groups of ten" cups inside as a visual for what 100 looks like. I forgot to snap a picture.
Even my little friend who doesn't speak any English was able to get in on the action and count some "ones" with his partner! YES!
I did an activity very similar to this that I blogged about
here last year if you are working on this concept and it's NOT Valentine's Day. However, I really liked having a visual "group of ten" so if I did this again I would probably use the little disposable cups again with groups of 10 M&Ms instead of the pretzel rods. Plus, the cups were fun to stack!
Do you notice a theme here with my math instruction? FOOD!
Hehe.
If you are looking for more place value and number sense activities, check out my "Making Sense of Numbers" resource
HERE.
Happy teaching to you!
'
