Math Smart Day

What an eventful day!  Universal screening assessments began in first grade at 9:30 am...no time to thoroughly "prep" the students for any type of independent work.  At the same time I tried to group children into math exploration stations, I had a knock on my door and got a new student!  Even though it's only day seven, the new student packets came in handy!  I had a set of every notebook, folder, paper, and all the odds and ends each student needs all ready to go!  The children were more than happy to maker her feel at home as we unpacked the new student kit and added her name to all the labels. 

  
I introduced "math smart" to the kids today.  We played math I have, Who has? games during morning meeting.  We play one of these games at least once a week as a team building activity during morning meeting.  I have tons of handmade versions that I hope to convert to electronic files that I can share.  Slowly but surely...I have already completed a few sets (Nonsense Words and Sight Words) and put them on my TpT site.  During math stations I noticed that the children really enjoyed working with a simple center I made a few years back.  

What do you do with all those 1x1" squares and red/yellow counter chips in your math kits?  I have thousands of each...so I wrote numbers 1-100 on bunches of them with a sharpie.  Instant hands-on skill practice! 

Today we matched the number to the hundred board, but there are plenty of other ways to use the number squares and counters.  Students can...

• Select numbers to put in order from least to greatest
• Select a number and then mark it off on a wipe-off hundred board
• Select numbers and mark off one more/ten more
• Create "number puzzles" putting numbers in sequence (horizontal by ones and vertical by tens) without a hundred board 
• Find / sort numbers that are odd & even

Send home a sharpie marker and a bag of math tiles or counters with a parent volunteer today and you'll instantly add a few hands-on activities to your math bag of tricks!