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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Hunger Games Math Competition is in Full Swing!!!

The Hunger Games math competition that we started a few weeks ago is in full swing, and is going so well!!!  I am very pleased with my kids progress.  The kids are really getting into it and working really hard.  Over the last 3 weeks the kids have solved 19,540 problems, completed 486 lessons, and mastered 448 standards.  My girls are losing to the boys right now, but they are working hard to change that.  I am very happy with how things are going so far :-)

Monday, January 6, 2014

Hunger Games Themed Math Competition

It has been quite a winter so far, I have been sick with mono, broken my foot, and we are on our third or forth snow day.  All this "down time" has given me some time to work on school stuff. I use the word "down time" loosely since in a teacher's world there doesn't ever seem to be true down time during the year :-).  For me though this down time as come from less time at the gym, Christmas break and snow days.  During this time I found a program on the internet called Moby Max.  It is a math and reading program geared toward identifying student gaps and providing lessons and practice right in the same program. Best part of all, the basic version is free!  Although I am excited about the program I really struggle with how to get the kids motivated to want to participate.

My teaching partner and I have decided in order to get the kids motivated we are going old school...  BOYS VS. GIRLS.  We are using Hunger Games as our theme for the competition.  Each student is a tribute and earns tickets to a drawing to have a chance to shoot at a target for points for their team.  In our case being a tribute with your name in the drawing a lot is good thing, not a dangerous thing.  They earn points for their team through various means built into the program like percentage of growth.  Each student also can earn bonus points for certain amounts of correctly answered questions in the program.  Again, the program tracks this. We are still working on a few things, but I am very excited!