Holiday Decorations

Team Explore has holiday spirit.  We took some time to get our room ready for winter and the holidays.  We had some bulletin boards to switch up and needed some festive touches in our environment.

We have so many bulletin boards this year, which is great.  However we felt a bit stuck on what to put on all them.  We have the basics, math word wall, word wall, inquiry board, etc.  Then there were 2 with work from the beginning if the year still.  Yikes!  One is a reflection calendar, we will save that for a later date.  Then I thought the other could be a seasonal or themed one that was more 'just for fun' board.  Students decorated gingerbread cookies for a fun holiday bulletin board in our room.  They had such a great time getting to color with their peers.  It is always nice to have some down time to enjoy each other's company.

We also made our snowman addition projects.  Students picked two number cards at random.  The numbers were matched to their math group ensuring they were adding numbers that were right for them.  They had one number has white snowflakes, and then the other number was blue snowflakes.  They filled in a sheet to say how many of each were falling on the snowman and wrote a number sentence to match.  It was a great activity and painting with hands is always exciting!  We did get this idea from Pinterest.  We created our own templates and writing portion after researching some winter math crafts.  

Math Fact Turkeys

Last week had only 2 days of school, but I feel like I saw so much turkey stuff around school.  I wanted to create a math project that would be fun, Thanksgiving themed and differentiated.  After looking around online and talking with my teaching partner I decided turkeys were the way to go.  We currently have 4 math groups so we needed 4 ways to mix math and turkeys.  One group is working on adding 1 to a number, the next is doing strategies to add any 2 numbers, we have one group learning doubles plus one and then a group learning how to find addition facts with a certain sum.  We decided the first 3 groups would use 2 different colored feathers to represent the addends in the addition fact, and the third would write the sum on the turkey body and the addition facts that equal that number on all the feathers.

After deciding how we would go about doing this project is was time to ready all the materials and start our work.  We made a white card stock copy of the body for them to cut and color. We copied feather outlines on orange, yellow, red and purple to give options and keep it fall themed.  We really wanted to use construction paper, so being brave we tested it in the copier and it worked.  Amazing!  The next day we did the first half of the project.  Each group met 1 at a time with the teacher their group had been working with you see what they needed to do.  They spent their workshop time only making their turkey.  They colored a body and cut it out.  Then cut out feathers in 2 colors, unaware of what they would do with them.  Once everything was cut out they glued it to a large piece of black paper and went on to do typical math workshop activities.  On day 2 they got a part that we glued on to the bottom of the black paper.  This had a little problem saying how many of the 2 colored feathers the turkey had, and a place to write a matching addition sentence.

The students really enjoyed doing this. It was a great way to integrate art, math and holidays.  Keep a watch on the blog... Our snowman version will be posted soon too!

Here are examples of our work!

This shows a number plus 1.  They got 1 feather of a color they choose then cut out however many or the other color they wanted.

This shows the group that just added 2 numbers.  Unfortunately I did not get a photo of the doubles plus 1 group.  Theirs looked like this but they did a math fact such as 6+7 to practice finding a double and adding 1 more.

This is the group that wrote number sentences with the same sum.