Keeping Up With Kirbys

Okay, so who has played the game Headbandz?? Well, my family LOVES it.  Some of us are better at it than others but we all LOVE it.  Truthfully, I'm the worst.  This is what it sounds like when you play with me: Me: Am I a green? Someone I Love: No Me:  Am I a tree? Someone I Love: No Me:  Am I Money? Someone Who is Frustrated with me: NO Me: Am I grass? Someone Who is Frustrated with me : No   ...and 2 hours later I'm still not getting a clue. But I LOVE this game! Soooo, I was thinking this would be a fun way to practice recognizing and adding up coins. Let's play HEADBANDZ!! If I could only have a check off sheet when I play with my family I would probably be a ROCK STAR at this game.  The kids loved this and worked with each other to help recognize their coins when they struggled. They were motivated to add up their coins and find out the value on their head.   No worries if you don't have the Headbandz game....you can use a sentence strip a

Well friends, I understand the confusion.  I've never been apart of speed dating but I imagine it just like the letters of these 2nd grade students.  (sorry for the bad pics...that's kinda how I roll) Ya'll these crack me up. I picture these being read without coming up for breath until you get to the last line -which is the same pic ture I get in my head of someone speed dating. Thank you Mrs. Beasley for being our pen pals.  The kids LOVED doing this and guess what?  They want to write ag ai n....this is AUTHENTIC learning!  Okay, we can write some more if that's what ya'll want to do. ;-)  One of the books that I read to the clas s before we started writing our friendly letter was Dear Mr. Blueberry . The kids loved it and I thought it was a perfect way to start our friendly letter unit .  Our first letter was to our lunch ladies politely asking for a new it em on the lunch menu. Next , we were able to set something up with another sch

It's FriYAY!! Something about short weeks seem so much crazier, busier, and waaay more hectic than if we just had class all 5 days.   I am thankful for my own learning time though.  I am NOT thankful for TELPAS time. Just sayin'.  I guess we could look at it as a reminder of the way kids may feel when we put them in that stressful testing environment.  I don't know about ya'll but I get so nervous and anxious.  I feel like I know my stuff but tell me that you are testing me and I forget EVERYTHING I know. In case you're curious I passed the first time and only missed ONE.  BOOYAH!!  But due to the stress of testing and being nervous I missed the part about only doing the second calibration if you failed the first one.  So, yes I did BOTH calibrations.  Geeze! Who has time to do that??  I get the necessary evil of testing.  I do.  Oh yea, I said I had a FREEBIE for this FriYAY!!  We have been working on counting a variety of coins. This can be a little tr

Hi Friends!  I wanted to share a little unit I put together for small group instruction with base ten blocks.  After going through our CBAs, studying them, and trying to figure out what my littles were thinking while taking this test I've come to the following conclusions: 1) They are 7 and 8 years old and sometimes they just make little kid mistakes. 2) We need to go back and review composing and decomposing numbers with base 10 blocks.  3)  I HATE when test makers use the word NOT...it's wrong. 4)  We need more work on part, part, whole word problems and I've found a wonderful site to help with that. Okay, first I was motivated by that pesky little word NOT and decided to create an activity to help the kids recognize the correct answer and the incorrect answer.   They can use the base 10 model form to count and sort according to their number.  Then once they understand, they can create their own NUMBER and NOT NUMBER. Now, let's talk about composin