Terrific Tuesday Ideas

So, yesterday I told you how I organize my folders on Mondays.  Today, I want to share with you two things I did in my classroom that worked really well.  If you are reading this, which still blows my mind, please know I in no way think I know everything.  I am so far from it, but I LOVE trying new ideas and more than anything, I think it's amazing that after 10 years in first grade, I still learn something new every day.

The first thing that is going great is a project I'm working on with my flex group.  In case your school doesn't do flex groups, basically flex groups are where we take ALL our first graders and divide them into groups based off of their skill level.  The low groups usually are very small, so each student gets more attention.  Our high groups focus on more higher level thinking skills and projects.  The next two weeks, I have the middle group.  We are focusing on addition right now.  Since one of our standards covers doubles, I decided I wanted to do double books.  We start off the first few minutes doing what I call Mad Math Minutes.  For three minutes, we see how many problems we can do.  It's great practice, especially when we use our Activboard, and the kids love it!  After that, we've been working on our double books.  The project is going great, but I do wish that we had longer than 30 minutes to work on it.  I've included pictures below and a link to where you can get it on my TPT site.  Hope you like it :)

Math - Appleseed Addition

The other Terrific Tuesday idea I have to share randomly hit me today.  I was teaching my students that I ALWAYS has to be capitalized when standing alone.  I wrote examples on the board for them to see.  Then, I wrote an I that was correct and an I that was incorrect in large, bold colors.  Then, we practiced coloring incorrect I's red and correct I's green.  I had never taught it this way, but something about the colors helped it to click.  Below is a picture of what I drew on my Activboard and a worksheet we did.  Even my strugglers did great today!  Oh, by the way, I looked on the worksheet for a name, but it didn't have one.  I'm pretty certain that Amy Lemons may have created it as a freebie on TPT.

This is what we did on the Activboard before we did the cut/paste activity. 

This is an example of how I had my kids color the correct answers green &
the incorrect answers red.  We did this before we ever cut anything.

I hope my ideas help you out!  If you have any cool ideas of how you teach addition or capitalization, please feel free to post it in comments.  I love reading/seeing all the different ideas!!!!