The Friday Before Thanksgiving

Hello Everybody and Happy Friday!

With report cards coming up and new standards to teach, this time of year can be a bit stressful.  I apologize for not getting anything out sooner for November, but my computer was not working from home for the last few weeks.  I have not had time to create as many activities as I would like, but here are the ones I finished up just in time:

Here is a November number ordering activity that will help your students struggling with pausing on the decade numbers (30, 40, 50, ) when counting.  Make sure you read the instructions because I did not order the numbers from 1-120.  There are 7 different ordering activities.

Here are two I have who has number identification games.  Struggling students in our first grade are having difficulty with identifying those tricky teen numbers so I thought this may help.


I have been working hard on fact families in my classroom, but I have not done any formal or informal assessment to check their understanding.  I decided to use this turkey pattern and write the fact families in the belly of the turkey and then have the students write number sentences as many ways as possible.  All year we have been looking at different representations of number sentences so I wanted to see if they could apply the concept yet.

Here is one paper from one of my students.  I don't think you can see but he has the following number sentences:  3+5=8, 5+3=8, 8=5+3, 8=3+5, 8-5=3, 8-3=5, and then wrote vertical number sentences as well.  I asked him to explain to me why he wrote the two I highlighted with black marker and he replied, "8=5+3 and 8=3+5."  I have never been so impressed!! 

Another assessment with a different fact family

This paper was not a one of a kind paper that I saw from my students.  I would not say my class is necessarily considered a high math group, but they are developing the number sense and concepts that they need to have a greater chance to be successful.   All I have been doing is showing them different ways to represent fact families.  I always have them calculate the number sentences horizontally, but will also show them the vertical representation to show that it means the same thing.

Have a Wonderful Weekend!

Tina Parker