The short three days before Christmas break was a full week of Christmas celebrations! While it was a fun week, I still wanted to implement some learning activities. So, for math we went to the gym and with both the second and third grade students, we played Math Madness. As seen before on my blog, Math Madness is somewhat of a relay game where teams of students take turns running to a laminated playing board to solve a problem as quickly as they can so that their team can finish all of the math problems first. We played this with a mixture of second and third graders solving addition problems on each team first and it seemed to work quite well!
The next time we played it, I placed all of the third graders on one team and separated the second graders into two teams. The second graders were solving addition problems again, but the third graders would be solving multiplication problems this time, which made it a little tougher on them!
These Math Madness games allowed math to be implemented when it may have been tricky to capture the attention of students with paper and pencil math problems during this chaotic week. Something else that we did during this week of Christmas was invite my dad, Uncle Bob, to our school to teach a Bible lesson to kindergarten through fourth grade students. We met in the church and Uncle Bob taught us the story of Josiah and how he learned how to worship the one true God from his grandfather Manasseh. After hearing the story, students had the opportunity to play a game to test how well they were listening to the story. Students loved this Uncle Bob time!
On Tuesday, we all went on the bowling field trip. It was exciting to watch the students demonstrate their bowling skills that they have developed over the past few weeks with Mrs. Duclos in gym. Students loved having this time to just have fun with each other and cheer each other on.
The last day of school before Christmas break is always a lot of fun. On this half day, each student had the opportunity to go to classrooms around the school and build different crafts in each classroom. Students loved going through the school and discovering which crafts they could take part in. We ended this day with a math treasure hunt for their Christmas presents and a little Christmas Family Feud as a class. It was a great end to our time together before Christmas break!
Our second and third graders took part in the Christmas Program this year and did a fabulous job! The second graders took part in saying a poem and singing a song along with the kindergartners and first graders while the third graders each had a special part to say on their own. Each and every student did amazing in delivering their Christmas message.
I was extremely proud of all of the hard work and practice that these students put into making this program a success. For those that weren't able to attend, this is always my favorite part of the whole program:
There is just something about hearing students sing Silent Night that really puts me into the Christmas spirit. Great job students and Merry Christmas!
We have officially entered the time before Christmas that I like to call "The Christmas Crazies". This is the time of the year when my students are just itching for Christmas break and have a hard time concentrating on the concepts that I'm trying to teach them. So, in order to contain my Christmas crazy students, I like to implement fun games and activities that will grab their attention (and hopefully keep it for a good amount of time) during this difficult time of the year.
The first game that I introduced to my students this week is a game called "Math Madness". This game involves two teams of students solving addition problems as fast as they possibly can. One student on each team would start it off by running forward to solve an addition problem on the poster board quickly, then run back to their team, hand off the marker, and then the next student would run forward to solve another addition problem. Once the team had all of the addition problems finished, they sat down on the ground to show me their team had finished. I would then check the answers on their team poster board to decide if they were officially done and had won the game. The fun thing about this game is that we can erase the number in the middle and do it over and over again with new addition problems each time. Here is a quick video with our second graders in action with "Math Madness". They loved this exciting math activity since it really got them moving quickly (while inadvertently practicing their math facts).
The other activity that I introduced this week I had heard about through Mr. Parks (thanks Mr. Parks!)...Plickers. Plickers is a website/app that we can use to review certain concepts to determine whether or not we have learned what we should have learned throughout the unit/chapter. I used Plickers with some of our social studies concepts this week since we have a unit test coming up quickly (Monday!). In order to use Plickers, each student has a special "answer card" where they turn it in different directions to answer a, b, c, or d. For each question, I display the question and the multiple choice answers on the Apple TV, then students make their choice and hold up their answer card. To record student answers, I scan each card with my iPad camera using the Plickers app and this automatically gives me data telling me which students got the question correct and which students need more help in understanding certain concepts. The students really got involved in answering questions and Plickers made review so much more entertaining for them as they got to participate and cheer each other on. Here is a video of our second and third graders participating in our first ever Plickers activity.
These two interactive activities have really helped us with "The Christmas Crazies" and we hope to implement a few more engaging activities this coming week to keep the craziness at bay! :)
