Lessons, Creations, and Freebies

Oh my goodness!  I have missed blogging so much!  Every year this is one of my busiest weeks of the year.  I volunteer every year to help with our Valentine Dance decorations.  That means that I work with 5 to 10 (or more) 5th grade girls Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons to make sure we get everything ready.  It is a ton of fun, but between that, mid-terms, meetings, and oh, deciding I wanted to redecorate a portion of my room, there's been very little time for blogging.  Seriously, I have made two trips to Target in two days.  I'm telling you guys if I could skip sleep altogether, I would.  I think that should be my super power - Faith the Fantabulous, the girl who needs no sleep!

Anyway, I am back and I have a new creation and a new freebie!  Plus, I did two AWESOME lessons that I have to share.  We have been working on 2 dimensional shapes and 3 dimensional shapes.  Well, with the new common core standards there are several new expectations.  So, I came up with this.  Using my Activboard, I made up a ton of random colored and sized shapes.  I made sure I saved the slide once I finished, so I could hit the reset button after each question.  Please make sure you do that!  It never fails that when I forget to save the power goes out, a child hits the red X, or the county updates our software.  Once I saved it, I called up different students to sort the shapes by size, color, and shape. I also would have them compare two shapes - how are these alike or how are these different?  Our favorite part was at the end.  I would pull a shape down and ask them, "What two shapes make a rectangle?" or "What two shapes make a hexagon?"  They had to figure out how to rotate shapes and make it work.  We also built items using the shapes.  For example, I had them build a car, ice cream cone, and a house.  So, if you have an Activboard or Smartboard, this is a reasonably easy lesson that your kids will love and it really hits every part of the standard that covers 2-D and 3-D shapes.  My kids sat for 45 minutes doing this and we were accidentally late to lunch :)

The other lesson we did was we took marshmallows and toothpicks and built shapes.  You can get the items you need from almost anywhere.  For 16 students, it took two bags of marshmallows and around 800 toothpicks.  They were completely engaged in this.  I'd call out a shape and they would get busy!  When we were close to finishing, I gave them what I call "Challenge" problems.  We built several 3 Dimensional shapes and I asked them what they would get if they put certain 3 Dimensional shapes together.  This lesson lasted around 45 minutes, too and some of my students that typically struggle with math did better than I've ever seen.  For two days, we didn't do our math pages, but I have a feeling they learned more from these two activities than if they were doing the math pages.


Now, for my new creation.  This is a set of 7 task cards that you can use with the Sweetheart candy hearts.  Instead of doing our usual math lessons next Thursday, we are going to do the task cards.  The kids already spotted the hearts behind my desk and they can't wait.  Here are the pictures of what you will be getting.  If you like it, click on the Candy Heart Fun page and it will take you to my TPT store.

Last of all, I kind of like being known for my freebies, so to apologize for my lack of blogging, here are two new Valentine math sheets.  If you want them, click on the sheet and it will take you to it.

Whew!  Talk about a lot of info!  Hopefully, I'll be back tonight to tell you a little about my room redecoration.  Have a great day at school!