Ones and Tens...Valentine Heart Style!

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!

'

The Day I Was Called Nana...

It's been a while, friends!  Sorry!

 

The 100th day of school, Valentine's Day, an 11 hour parent-teacher conference day, and an "emergency drill that turned out to not be a drill" to top off the week on Friday afternoon will do that to a girl! 

 

I don't have tomorrow off for President's Day...but I know lots of you do so ENJOY and stay in your jammies for as long as humanly possible tomorrow so I can live vicariously for you.

 

I still have some school work to do to get ready for the week so I'm going to let the pictures do most of the talking!

 

We played tons of math games this week to work on new stuff (skip counting, numbers to 100, patterns on a 100s chart, etc.)  as well as to review some old stuff that was a little shaky on the last cumulative test.

 

My kiddos were still struggling with ordering 3 numbers from least to greatest and greatest to least.  I made a simple litle sheet for them to practice and used a deck of cards to spice things up a bit.  They worked with a partner to draw 3 cards, build cube towers for each of the cards, and order the 3 numbers from least to greatest before recording on the sheet. 

 

 

They LOVED this little fact family activity (more review).  It is available in my TPT store for 2 bucks!
 

We partied hard on Valentine's Day!  We kept the food simple because let's be honest...the kids are WAY too excited about those silly little paper valentines to care much about eating.  We did make these little Valentine Floats (lots of versions on pinterest!) as a fancy-schmancy drink!

They were a hit!  I used a scoop of vanilla ice cream, cherry 7-up, LOTS of whipped cream, and fun sprinkles!  I'm not a huge fan of anything cherry but the kids slurped them right up (and I may or may not have eaten a cup full of whipped cream and sprinkles).

 

I did glowstick valentines (thank you Target dollar spot!) and the kids loved wearing them as bracelets.

 

My favorite part of Valentine's Day was (and always is)  the "Bucket Books" that I make for the kids.  It's a kind of a pain-in-the-rear project that I always end up being glad I did once I make them and the kids read them.

Over the years, I've simplified it a little bit and it's really not so bad.

 

Basically, I call each kid up one at a time (you need to start a week or two in advance)  and ask them to give every member of the class a compliment...something to "fill their bucket."  They come up with some great things...some need a little prompting, but it's actually amazing what they can usually come up with on their own.

 

I type each compliment on a blank page of labels (in MS Word).

 

Then, I print them out and stick each label on a half sheet of paper.  I put all of the half sheets in a gallon ziploc bag and we take an afternoon for the kids to illustrate all of the pages of compliments that they came up with.

 

Then, I sort them by student so that each kid gets an entire book of compliments about themselves!

 

 

You should just see their sweet faces light up when they start reading through them. They're shocked at some of the things that people think about them! 

 

Here are some sweet examples of the kinds of compliments that my sweeties came up with.

 

Total sweetness.

 

Now...my LEAST favorite part of Valentine's Day was when a child called me "Nana" by accident.  Don't get me wrong...I get called "mom" every other day but "NANA"??

 

Sheesh...time to look into some new concealer and wrinkle cream, I believe.

 

The only redeeming part of this little cutie calling me Nana was that he also brought me a red rose and gave me this card.

 

My heart offically melted.  He can call me Nana all he wants now.
(and he gets an A on everything from now on forever and ever, amen)
Kidding...kinda.

 

On a completely unrelated note...look what I got in the mail yesterday! 

We are now officially ready for the wedding (hurry up, May!) because our "son" has his attire!

  How handsome is this little dude?

 

Stud. muffin.

 

 

Happy Monday!

 

Happy teaching to you!