Candy Corn Fact Families

Today was a GREAT day!  The kids are really rockin' and rollin' in math groups!  Fall is in the air and we enjoyed using a few game boards from my Spooktacular Math Games pack on Friday during math game centers!  The kids really work hard during the Monday through Thursday rotations to "earn" math game centers on Friday.  I love giving the students time to practice skills and strategies in somewhat heterogeneous groups, so I would do math game rotations whether they actually earned it or not!  It is a powerful motivation tool to use with the kids during math groups.  

Today we started a new set of rotations.  We've been working on math mountains and fact families for a couple weeks now, so I put some candy corn fact family manipulatives and a wipe off recording sheet (as usual... I LOVE working smarter while saving a few trees) in the Hands-On center.  

Students chose a bag of candy corn parts for a specific sum (ten, nine, eight, etc), used the pieces to rearrange the numbers, and then recorded the fact families on their sheet.  One of my colleagues, a second grade teacher, made the recording sheet and I happened to see it on Friday as I was leaving the building.  I swiped it for my centers today and encouraged her to put it on TpT so others could use it too!  She has the best ideas!  Simple, FUN for students, and easy to differentiate!

 

My students loved moving the candy corn pieces around (even though we learned that the yellow part of the candy is actually the bottom piece...ooops!).  Make yourself a few candy corn manipulatives from construction paper (white at the top, orange in the middle, and yellow at the BOTTOM...hahaha) and download the FREE Candy Corn Fact Families sheet from TpT.  Have fun!