Math Mondays

Today's math post is a little different from the norm.

Today, I had my second evaluation.

For those of you in Tennessee, y'all know the lovely trials that we are going through with these things.

Anyway, I did my full hour eval on my calendar.

Yes, my calendar time can last an hour and I think the kiddos learn more from this time than any other during the day.

It's whole group, partner sharing, standing up, sitting down, singing, dancing, goofing off..loads of fun!

I've always had my calendar time be a fun learning experience..but after I saw Mr. Smith over at Teacher Tipster doing a few "even greater" things I decided to take mine up a notch.

Here is my calendar. Yes, it looks overwhelming, but it's not.

We start off by reading our objectives for the week. I keep it pretty simple for my kiddos.

Then we move on to the months of the year.

Thanks to Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for the Calendar Cards.

We sing our Month Macarena then we count to the Lime Green Wikki Stick.

(The blue wikki stick is for our next holiday off).

Then we write our code date up above and read our date.

We talk about ways that we can use our date.

(i.e. writing it on our paper, in our journal, knowing the day if someone asks us)

I put dots under each number for our next part of the calendar. I don't use 10's frame here because it gets a little confusing to the kiddos.

Next, we count the number of days in the month and convert it to money.

Right now we have only discussed the penny and nickel, so that is all we use.  

I will add the dime in December and the quarter in February.

This is also where we do our daily patterns.

Today was an easy one because we just introduced this to our calendar.

The page with their names documents who came in the room first. We line up in that order and the students who were after 10 get to answer ordinal questions (who is 6th in line, etc. and for a fun twist, I am always turning the line in different directions to see who is keeping up)

When we talk about our money, we read these poems.

What is funny is that I did not know where this poem came from and just this past weekend, Erica Bohrer posted new posters with polka dots..problem solved!

The kids LOVE these and my class has learned coin identification and counting so much easier with the poem and with counting the days using money!

After counting the days in coins, we move to counting how many days we've been in school. 

I still use my straws in the 1's, 10's and 100's place. Then we do our tally marks song and write the tally for the day. Notice my equal sign between the two.  We talk about things being written in different ways, but still are the same number.

We also have the day of the month written in an even or odd column. Some numbers are missing and yes, it's on purpose. =)

Along with this is our Inspector Fix It..also taken from Teacher Tipster..but with my own "movie" twist to it.

I've started doing two sentences...a telling sentence and a question sentence.

It is SO hard for them to comprehend the question!

Moving on to our days of the week.

The arrows come off and move from one day to the next.

We sing Seven Days in a Week from Teacher Tipster.

For answering TODAY, we rock out our guitars and just sing a little rock number that Mr. Smith created...it goes "Today, today, today...AWWW YEAH!"

For answering YESTERDAY, we sorrowfully sing, "Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away. Now I need to know what was yesterday. (child's name), what was yesterday?"

For answering TOMORROW, we joyfully sing, "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow. It's only a day away!"

My favorite part of the ENTIRE calendar time!!!

Why didn't a chorus girl like me, think of that!

Now we sing our "What Will the Weather Be Today?" song from Dr. Jean.

I had to make up a foggy icon to go with this song...yes it's the windy sign, but I tell them to pretend it's low lying clouds, since we can't see the wind anyway! =)

Also, you will see my number chooser for answering questions.  Sometimes I call on students who raise their hand and other times I use this to call on students at random.

Then we sing the Dr. Jean Shape Song and I call on students to answer questions about the Shape Chart. My all time favorite chart because it has EVERY shape that we learn AND it calls the "diamond" a "rhombus" like it is supposed to!

Then we count our numbers.

Count by 10's: we spread out our 10 fingers and do push ups, sometimes in the air, sometimes for real.

Count by 5's: I heard a song several years ago and I have no clue where it came from.  I don't even know if I have the words right, but the kids love it and our counting by 5's by the end of the first week that I teach it.

Count by 1's to 50 (right now anyway): I love to use silly voices and play games to break away from the counting monotony!

Also, notice the letters of the week. We practice writing them in the air.

Lastly, we review our rules of the classroom.

Taken from Whole Brain Teaching

We of course also sing our Frog Street songs for the letters that we are working on and for our colors. I just couldn't take pictures of everything.

So, that was my evaluation today...plus a few other things.