Hunger Games - Final Round...

Our Hunger Games Competition has gone so well.  The girls won all three of the rounds so far.  Our forth and final round leading up to testing is not going to be girls vs. boys.  Instead, each student is going to be competing for themselves.  I have set a goal for each of my students.  If they are not are not currently on grade level than their goal is to get to grade level (no matter how many grade levels that is).  Students that are on grade level or above have a goal of increasing another grade level.  Their prize... once each student individual student reaches their goal they are exempt from homework for the rest of the year.  I hope that this final round is as successful as the rest have been.

Bulletin board used to track tributes

Girls Won...

My girls pulled out a win in round 1 at the very last min.  I am very proud of them.  :-)  Round 2 started Monday.  I am impressed at how motivated they are staying.  I am really hoping the time they are spending pays off and fills in some of the learning gaps from along the way.   More importantly I hope the kids realize how much they are growing.  I want them to be proud of themselves and see that hard work pays off.

Some of my lower kids are doing so much better with their basic math facts.  They have been working so hard on Reflex Math and now Moby Max.  It is great to be teaching math and have the kids answer me quickly when I ask what is 8 x 6.  We aren't held up trying to solving math facts and counting on our fingers so much any more, making us able to tackle more of the grade level specific content.

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 :-)

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!

Solving Word Problems

Every year, one of our biggest struggles is problem solving skills.  Word problems are intimidating for a lot of students.  My kids always struggle with knowing what to do or where to start.  This year, I made a poster with some key words for my students.  I used math operation symbols and inside of each typed words that help indicate which operation to use. My hope is that it will be a starting point for them as they develop these skills.  I copied the poster for my kids and they cut in apart and glued the images into their composition book.  We included an example problem with each image.

All of the reading in word problems is an immediate problem for students.  They see all the reading and automatically shut down.  I hope that having a few strategies will make them less intimidating from the start.

The F word...

FRACTIONS...  Every year my students dread fractions.  When I tell them that is what we are working on they all gasp and moan.  Of course it is never as bad as they imagine it will be.

For multiplying  fractions this year I created a graphic organizer with my students that had all the steps they would need to solve a problem.  I use steps in my classroom whenever possible.  My lower students will jump at the chance to have steps and then they follow them religiously.  The steps to working out the problems make them feel successful.  They can participate in class conversations and always can relate to where we are in a problem.  If they are lost I can simply tell them what step we are at and they can pick it right up with us.  It helps them to not make silly mistakes as well.  Once they have the steps mastered the students are more confident to move on to more grade level appropriate and challenging problems with the steps as a guide.

Multiplying fractions isn't a sixth grade skill, but applying fractions to other problems, like word problems, is a sixth grade skill.  I often find that the basic skills need reinforced/taught  before we can get to the higher level thinking.  The the steps seem to be a very efficient way to get us successfully moving forward.

I created an anchor chart, to hang in my room, that matched my students graphic organizer.  Unfortunately, the laminator machine ate it!!! :(  I got a picture before I sent it through... so you can see what it did look like.

I don't really want to devote an entire new entry to dividing fractions, but this is what kids glued into their composition books for steps to divide fractions.  It is hard to see, but this graphic organizer focused a lot on the vocabulary.  We stuck with the traditional "Keep it, Change it, Flip it" but also added some technical terms to it.

This was our graphic organizer for
dividing fractions...

Skittles Lab

We did a Skittles Lab this last week in science. Our science blocks are pretty short, so it took us about 3 days. I absolutely love this lab!!! It incorporates so many different skills from both math and science. 

Kids start by making a hypothesis about how many total Skittles and how many of each color they think there are in a fun size bag. Then, they open their bag and fill in a data table with their information.  Next, students go around to each other and collect others Skittles data. Once they have all their data, students find the average of the total Skittles in a bag as well as the average for each color. Next, students make two bar graphs, one of their personal data and one of the class averages. Students have to identify the independent and dependent variables and write a strong a conclusion. Finally, students find the median, mode and range of the data for each color of Skittle.

Students collecting data

calculating averages

student data table

counting Skittles

happy hump day...

Interactive Notebooks

I am finally getting around to this post... It has only taken me a few weeks, but I guess that is what happens when school is in. I am using interactive notebooks this year for math and science. I am loving them so far.

For the front inside of the science notebook I had the kids make a picture table of contents. They had to divide the page into 6 sections (one for each unit) and draw and color at least 2 pictures that represent that topic.
This was mine before it was finished. (I still need a few pictures of my kids books)

For the inside of the math notebook I had the kids do a Math About Me page. I found this idea on Pinterest. (The "link" just goes to a picture so I have no idea where it really came from.) For this page they had to come up with six ways to tell something about them using numbers. They had to add pictures and color to this pages as well.

More pages to come...

P.A.L.S.

Grad school class is over for the summer, but I am working on using a great article we read to help with intervention time. It was an article about peer assisted learning strategies (P.A.L.S.). You can read the article here for yourself, but basically you level your kids high to low and split the class in half. Then, you take the top student from the top half and the top student from the bottom half and they are partners. So in a class of 22 kids #1 and #11 would be partners, #2 and #12 and on down. I love this idea because your highs aren't with your lowest, and you lowest are not grouped together either. The system would also not easily be figured out by the kids, so you would not have a lot of dumb group, smart group comments. In the student partners there is a coach and student. The coach reads a script provided by the teacher that steps the student through a process to solve a specific type of problem (for example converting fractions to decimals). They read the script for each question on the paper, and the student follows the step to solve each problem. Students switch roles and the coach becomes the student and the student the coach. Ideally, you would have your lower student be the coach first. This way they are reading the process and seeing a set of problems worked out by the higher student before they solve a set of problems. Intervention time is about 30 minutes in my school and very challenging at the 6th grade level. On our team of 4 teachers we switch kids for team time every week. I am hoping that I can impliment this in the classroom and it will give students some additional one on one practice in a smaller setting. It makes each student actively participate in the lesson as well, which can be hard when there are 30 kids in the room.