Favorite Concept Game - POP! (freebie included)

IT IS FEBRUARY!
That is just so crazy to me.

Happy Thursday guys! Today, I wanted to share a game used regularly in my class. This is one of those games that rocks because you can use it for pretty much any concept, any subject.
I don't recommend using this game to introduce or teach the concept. This is the game I pull out after the anchor charts have been made, the practice has been done, and kids just need to PRACTICE.

It's tried and true POP! There are so many names for this game but I used POP when I taught kinder because...easy CVC. Then, when I moved up it was to hard for me to get used to another name so it stuck.
With POP, you create cards with whatever concept you want kids to practice. In kinder, I had sight word cards. In 3rd, I have fact & opinion cards, cause & effect, fractions, multiplication problems, seriously ANYTHING. You show one card to each kid and if they get it, they keep the card. If they don't, they return it. They collect cards until they pull a POP card at which point they get POPPED.

But what I've done is made my POP games digital. I turned them into slides and now we can easily play as a whole class.

I have all my kids stand up. I start with number 1 (class numbers) and display the slide for them. They answer, stay up if they're right, sit if they're wrong. If a POP slide comes up on their turn, they sit. Kids stay pretty engaged because the slides will loop around again.

Sometimes I will mix this up in a variety of ways. One way to do this is to do random "back from the dead" slides. Pick someone who was out but was paying great attention, sitting nicely, etc. and tell them they get a chance to POP back in. If they answer their slide correctly, they stand back up. (I try to do this with ANY kids that get POPPED without answering a question  - that way everyone answers).

Another thing I will do is play in teams. In this variation, the two teams sit in a circle. Pick a team and have them pick someone to start, they stand up first. They answer, with the help of their team. If they are POPPED, they sit at their seat. The next person in the circle from the other team stands up. You alternate questions with teams. The last team to have members WINS. This way is great if you have students you don't want embarrassed by the 1 on 1 nature. They can still participate but they get team help.

I hope you will try POP in your classroom sometime soon! My kids even love doing a round during inside recess.

And just because it's FEBRUARY and I know things are CRAZY - here is a freebie of the POP we did in my class TODAY. It is Fact and Opinion.

Look for other digital POP games in my TPT store SOON.

Happy teaching!

Digital Word Sorts - Nearpod

Happy Monday teachers!

Today's post is about something I'm really excited to share, mostly because it's about my favorite tech tool. If you haven't already heard about Nearpod, you are truly missing out.
Nearpod is a great tool for interactive lessons, formative assessments, and more. Basically, you can make a presentation that students can access on their own devices using a code. From there, you can add quizzes, activities, videos, etc. My favorite feature, though, is draw it. Wit the draw it tool, you can allow students to draw, write, or type on any slide. Basically, you can create digital task cards, worksheets (although yuck), or basically anything you want.

Just go play around with it. I promise you will love it.

One of my favorite ways to use Nearpod, though, is for our weekly word sorts. I love to have students thinking about words and word parts. I want them to be able to sort our words of the week but I hate the hassle of cutting and pasting...or frankly, even making 24 copies of anything.

So this year I began using Nearpod for our weekly sorts. Each Monday, students come in and enter the code. The first slide they see is the list of words. They look over them and write them down (if you use agendas, this is perfect for that). Then they go to the next slide which is just a blank sort form. Like this

I usually include 4 sections even though they know they don't have to use them all. Or, they can use more. Students use the pen tool or the text tool (what they usually prefer) to sort the words out. Once they turn that in, they go on to the "open response" part. This is where I give them a word part and they must come up with their own words that have that part.
In this sort, I asked students to type 3 plural words that use "ies", 3 plural words that use "es", and 3 other plural words.

Here is an actual student response from our word sort this week. The words use au, aw, and ough.

The best part is, all you have to do is go to "Reports" on your Nearpod home page to see everything students did and submitted. 

Easy, paperless way to get the job done.

If you use digital word sorts, let me know how it goes.

Again, Happy Teaching!

Vocabulary Activities (Upper Elementary)

Happy FRIDAY!
I hope your week went well. I still cannot believe we are nearly though January!
This week I wanted to share with you some vocabulary activities I use in my room. We use the vocabulary associated with our reading curriculum, although sometimes I change it out. I don't think the words matter so much as long as students are increasing the quantity of words they understand. However, I find some curriculum vocabulary to be extremely content specific and not as relevant to my students. For this reason, I like to exchange some of those with words I have noticed my students coming across frequently in reading and not understanding. Something I want to do even better with next year is student led vocabulary. I love the idea of students adding words to a box or poster when they come across words they don't know. From there, the class can pull their vocabulary words. Those kind of words would be perfect for the activities I want to talk about today.

First off, a vocabulary activity I use all year.
Vocabulary Sentence Scramble
 It takes a bit of prep but isn't hard and is so amazing. I got this idea from The Brown Bag Teacher and tweaked it to fit our needs. All you do is get some (preferably colored) sentence strips, a marker, and your vocabulary words. You will need to have a sentence for each word (if you're using curriculum words, there are probably some sentences there or even pull sentences from your story). Write out the sentences on the strip, leaving a blank for the vocabulary word. Then, cut the sentence strip apart word by word. Students work to unscramble the sentence and fill in the blank with the correct vocabulary word. This is always an option for my students at word work and they choose it often. They love the challenge and the puzzle aspect. At first, I would help them by including how many letters the vocabulary word had (instead of a _____ blank, I would put _ _ _ _, etc.) and include the capitalization and punctuation. Throughout the year, I take the help away and students must include the capitalization and punctuation in their recording sheet.

Each week, I create the new sentences, cut them up, throw them in baggies and load them in our word work tubs. Easy peasy. And don't worry if you don't have colored sentence strips (or run out, like I have). You can use a different colored marker for each sentence on white strips and students can separate them back in their baggies that way.

The next activity is another I've seen around the Internet, tweaked, and LOVE. 

Conversation Competition

This may be the easiest way to get your students using their vocabulary words in "conversation" I have seen yet. We did this activity today and all my students were abuzz using their words.

For this one, all you will need is a sheet of paper with the vocabulary words on it like this...

(our vocab words this week)

Put students into partners. Each partner will need one vocabulary sheet and a pencil. Then, have partners stand around the room. (disclaimer: this activity will need some modeling. I picked one of my "higher" vocabulary students to help me walk through the activity before I threw students out there). When you say go, students must take turns using the vocabulary words in a real life sentence (must make sense, try to be relevant and/or creative - make it fun!). When they've used the word, have students initial next to the word on their sheet (disclaimer 2: the first time my students did this, I told them to just checkmark but they lost track of which partner had done that word so initials are better). BOTH partners must use all the words in "conversation" (i.e. each word should have 2 initials). When they've finished (and this will inevitably take longer than they think) they sit. Keep track of the order partners sit. 

Call the first team that sat up to share out their sentences. The class must come to a consensus whether they used the words correctly or not. If they did, they can be the winner. I usually throw out some superlative awards after that. For example, I may say "today, I'm giving a most creative award" and pick a student that came up with a creative sentence. I also do funnies (but appropriate), longest, shortest, etc. But the trick is, the word must be used correctly, tense and all. 

As students get older or more adept, you can make it more challenging by requiring that it be an actual conversation. I found, however, that my 3rd graders weren't quite there yet and it was enough for me that they were using the words. 

How many times have you asked your kids to write sentences using their vocabulary words? Try this instead.

So, there are two of my favorite vocabulary activities for the upper elementary classroom. Vocabulary is so important and I am always searching for more ways to make it relevant and engaging. Share some of your favorite activities with me!

Happy teaching!

Word Work Boggle - LOW prep! (free printables)

Happy JANUARY! We are halfway there! (Can you believe it!?)
Are you as ready as I am to get back to the grind? By that, I mean not ready at all. I love my pajamas.

But alas, we are on our way back. And now that we have been doing Daily 5 for half a year, we are desperate for some new word work options. I have seen the idea of Boggle for ages and love it. But I am notoriously bad about changing out bulletin boards. Plus, I would have kids fly through a board and finish before it was time for me to change it out.

So, I sat down to make Boggle more realistic for our classroom. Enter Mini Boggle Boards. I print, laminate, and throw them into our blue word work tubs. This way students can
* choose the board they would like to work on (there are smaller, bigger, various levels)
* change when they've exhausted a board
* get a differentiated board (for groups I want working on certain things)

As I was making them, I realized how smart it would be to include word parts that I want my kids to internalize. These would be especially good if you are a kinder/1st grade teacher teaching phonics. This gets kids moving away from making simple "sat, hat, mat" words to words that include "tion", "ing", or long vowel patterns.

I hope you can find a way to use these boards in your own classroom! The best part is I am gonna give you the ones my kids use (and love) for FREE. All I ask is that you hop over to Instagram and show some love.

You can find me on Instagram at AubreeTeaches.

OH, you want the printable?

here you go

Happy NEW YEAR!

peek at our THANKSGIVING week

Hey peeps!

Short weeks before a break are just hard. They seem to drag on like 2 full weeks. Everyone is ready to be on break, the schedule is all sorts of jacked up, and there is some assembly going on every 5 minutes.

AHHH!

I knew 2 things for sure. We couldn't do math stations (without a full week) and we needed to do something fun....with candy.

This is not Thanksgiving related so it's a perfect activity to use any time of year. If you teach multiplication/division concepts and/or you like Skittles this one is for you.

I put my students into groups (I used their math station groups but you obviously group however you like.) The beauty of this activity (and any good activity) is that it can be so easily differentiated by the amount of Skittles you give each group. Not only more or less but also giving some groups a number that will be hard to share "equally" and have them grapple with remainder.

After my students were in groups, I told them their task. They were to make a dozen cupcakes (i.e. 12). In their bag they already had the cupcakes ready (awe, paper cupcakes!? yeah, but REAL SKITTLES!) Each cupcake had to have the SAME amount of Skittles. 

I passed out the bags. The bags included a dozen cupcakes and varying amounts of Skittles (36, 48, 72, or some odd numbers like 61 and 17). The bags also had recording sheets for each student. All they needed to bring was a pencil.

Groups got to pick a spot around the room. You may want to tell your students to spread out as they will need lots of room to "work on" their cupcakes. 

First, I had students count out their cupcakes (12) and their skittles so they could write in those amounts. Then, I told them to start "baking". 

I walked around to facilitate. Students could divide the skittles however they wanted as long as each cupcake had the same amount. They needed to write down how many "leftovers"/remainders they may have had. Then, they would write the division problem and corresponding multiplication problem. For some groups, it was easier to start with multiplication which was fine.

After they filled in one row, they weren't done. They were challenged to put a different equal amount into each cupcake. (for example, a group that had 36 skittles may have started by putting 3 in each cupcake resulting in no leftovers. They could then try 2 or 4 in each cupcake and they would have a remainder which makes the division & multiplication equations a little more challenging). 

The most interesting part of this activity was when one group decided to play around with zero. That led to some really good discussions about multiplying or dividing with zero. The concrete representation really made sense to them. I love facilitating during activities like this because we really dive deep and I can easily differentiate.

I hope you try this activity out in your own classroom and let me know how it goes! It worked perfectly for a short week before holiday...which is coming again soon!

Want the activity? Click on any picture above or right HERE. 

:) Happy HOLIDAYS!

Subtraction Strategies For The WIN

Hey again!
You know how I'm big on strategies? No? Well, you should.
I'm big on them.
My kids know this. We talk a lot about how we can memorize math but if we someday forget it, what will we do? We need a strategy to fall back on. It's just SMART.

Last post, I covered how I cover multiplication strategies with my class. Well, today I'm gonna take us "back" I the curriculum and talk about the subtraction strategies I use with my class.
Something shocking to me when I moved into third grade was students lack of understanding with addition and subtraction. They seemed to vaguely remember some kind of rules they had been told but they either used them incorrectly or not at all. Every. single. student.
Even students that were "high" math kids and had great understanding would botch computation problems by trying to use some abstract RULE they had been told and simply couldn't recall or understand. When presented another way, these students could get the problem easily.
They had been ingrained with some arbitrary rule of how to do math. A rule that ditched place value, threw out number sense, and was made by one person one time.
And it took me 9 weeks to erase that.
9 week of frustration but my students finally starting valuing getting an answer that made sense over doing "big kid math" (please don't perpetuate this - looking at you 2nd grade teachers).

Here are 2 strategies I guided my students toward and how they ran away with them. Why two? Because I introduced them and using one of these ways,  every student in my class could subtract. Every student.

Open number lines are my love language. I remember learning about them in college and it was a whole new world to me. YES. This is how I do math in my head and I bet it's the way a lot of you do to. Chances are you've heard of an open number line but for those sleeping beauties, here is the gist.
You draw a number line. You know, that line with two arrows on either end (because numbers go on forever). Put the number you want to start with on one end and the number you want to end at on the other.
Now, before you introduce these you need to make sure that your students understand subtraction is the difference between 2 numbers (it's literally called finding the difference). In fact, that little minus symbol means in between. I relate this to book pages. If someone tells you to read pages 35-72 you don't just read 35 and 72, right?
NO. You read those and the pages in BETWEEN. To find the difference, we have to find the numbers between. Start at one number and count up to the second.
There are two ways to put this on your number line. Let's do 74 and 35 as an example.
You can put 35 on one and and 75 on the other and count up.
OR you can put 75 on one end and 35 on the other and count back. Counting up makes sense to me and is how I introduced it at first but changed my mind about that when I had a few students who thought it made more sense the other way. I think because they relate subtraction to getting smaller. Either way works so let students find what makes sense for them.
Once you have your line set up, you can start doing jumps. At first, I have students use 1 jumps. They soon discover this can take forever. So we start circling over ten of the little one jumps and doing 10 jumps. Make sure your students have a firm grasp on adding or subtracting 10 from any number (pull you your hundred charts!). Later, students can do any jumps that make sense to them (5s, 2s, 20s, 100s,).
In our example of 74 and 35, I would start at 35 and do 3 ten jumps to arrive at 65. From there, I could do 9 one jumps and reach my goal - 74. The 3 ten cups and 9 one jumps make 39 jumps. 39 numbers from 35 and 74.
A lot of students stick with ten and one jumps and that is FINE. Tens and ones make sense, they're familiar and students have worked with them before. I wouldn't stress making kids move toward other jumps until they're doing problems in the hundreds or thousands.
Here is an example I show my kids. They help me fill in the boxes under each jump. Then, we see how many jumps it took to find the difference.

The beauty of number lines is if practiced enough, they help kids improve their mental math skills. This is something you should model for your students. Every time we work on a subtraction problem, I show my kids how you can do tens and ones jumps in your head (recording on your hand or a sheet of paper) and arrive at your answer.

 

Let me paint you picture. You have a student in from of you trying to subtract 53 and 27. She remembers that she absolutely positively has to start with her ones (eye roll) so she looks at 3 and 7. She writes 4. What do you say to her?

Don't tell me.
I got it.

"You CANNOT subtract 3 from 7. If I have 3 dollars could I give you 7? Exactly, no"

WRONG.
Don't believe me? Ask a middle school algebra teacher who is MAD at you right now.
Teach your kids the concept of negative numbers. TRUST ME, it makes way more sense to them than the regrouping thing.
I am not just saying this. I have done it with low kids and high kids. And this is how.
First, we talk about the concept of negative numbers. Like, if you needed 7 dollars but I only had 3 I could give you the 3 NOW and owe you 4 later. Next time I get more money, I will take the 4 out of that and give it to you. This means I owe you 4. Negative 4 (-4)
Together, my students and I build a number line that includes negative numbers to -10 and positive numbers to 10. We play around and we practice. Soon, students realize that any subtraction problem FLIPPED is the negative same number. Like, 5-3 is 2 and 3-5 is negative 2. See how this helps us to get negative answers quickly? But students need to arrive at this conclusion.
Once they've played around, we apply the concept to larger subtraction problems.
Let's go back to our original example. 53 minus 27. First of all, I let students start with the tens. You know, we really might need to borrow or take away so it's good to know what we are working with. Even in standard algorithms this is good. Anyway, we start there. 50 -20 is 30, right? So we write down 30. Then we look at ones. 3-7, students look at the number line and see that this will be -4 (or realize that 7-3 is 4 so the opposite is negative 4 - let them work at their pace). We have our 30 so let's take the 4 from there. That will give us what we need. 30 - 4 is 26. The answer is 26.
I know, I KNOW. This was another mind blower when I thought of it. It makes sense for any subtraction problem as long as you keep the place value. WHY HASN'T SOMEONE SHOWN ME THIS?!
I love this strategy for a lot of reasons. It retains place value so kids aren't thinking about digits only, it introduces them to negative numbers (algebra teachers will praise you - don't tell kids you can't take a bigger from smaller!) and it plain makes sense to kids.
They totally get the idea of negative. Of owing something. It's a real life thing.
At first, I too was skeptical about this method. I used it often with my high kids but wasn't sure about my lows. One day, I decided to just go with it. And guess what? They got it. They write themselves a little negative number line right there and miss way less problems. I saw our computation scores go up big time when I introduced this to them.

If you have students struggling with subtraction, I urge you to try out one of these ways. If you use diligence, you might be surprised how much your students grow with understanding.

Here is a free sheet that you can use to help your kids practice using expanded form and negative numbers to subtract. :) Click to download. 

Happy Teaching! 

Peek into Third

Hey guys! It's been a minute since my last blog post but honestly, I've been quite busy. Back to school is busy enough but I've also been juggling a new district, new school, and new grade.
And it's been rough. I haven't felt nearly put together enough to even write a blog post about it.
But here we are in October (my favorite month and also HOW?) and I'm finally feeling ready enough to let you in on some routines I use in my 3rd grade classroom.

First, let me share our schedule and then I will walk you through the different pieces. Since the whole day would be the longest blog post of all time, I'm going to break it down into sections.

Problem of the Day is something I display on the SmartBoard and students work on in their math journals as soon as they come in. Our curriculum has problems of the day an often I use those but sometimes I will pull problems I know my students need help with or are going to encourage them to think more critically.

After I take care of morning housekeeping tasks, I try to walk around and just take a quick "temperature" of each kid and how they're doing on their task. Depending on how my class is doing, we go over the problem at the beginning of morning meeting or I pull it into whole group math. 

I will address problems of the day in a whole post soon. (as well as Morning Meeting)

For today's post I want to focus on the Reading portion of our day.

Here is the way I try to break up our mini-lessons for whole group reading

Monday: Mentor text and graphic organizer to practice our comprehension strategy, word sort to practice spelling skill

Tuesday: I use a story from our curriculum to practice the comprehension skill (usually main idea or theme) and have students practice independently/with a partner

Wednesday: Short grammar lesson, genre - we also play a game with our vocabulary words this day

Thursday: I use Readworks passages or our curriculum story to practice "test prep" (I love using QAR) and doing some close read activities together 

Friday: Review games and extra practice

I keep my whole group times short and sweet. I also don't delve into the "deep" things because I see my kids in small group to hit those.

After we do a short whole group lesson or activity, we go into Daily 5. My school requires us to do Daily 5 and we have 4-5 teachers that push-in during this time. I have 2 teachers in my room. So, with both of them meeting a group as well as myself, there are actually very few kids doing Daily 5. My lower kids only do this 1-2 times a week because they see both teachers and me. For this reason, it was hard for me to make a forced rotation schedule that worked for us.

I decided to instead let students have complete choice (gasp!) over what center they want to do at each time. I really went heavy on procedure practice and guess what? It works. 

This is what I display on our SmartBoard during Daily 5. I call students by groups to get to pick. I don't really care how many students are at each center (except listening - which is why I only have 5 earbuds and once they're gone you choose something else). My students know that if they see a teacher they get their stuff ready and get to that spot and if they don't, they make a choice, get their stuff, and find a spot.

Daily 5 is one of our favorite parts of the day.

During this time, I see my bubble kids everyday, my low kids twice a week (they're being seen twice every day), and my high kids twice a week (I desperately wish for more time). I do an intervention program my school has (although I tweak it) for my bubble kids and fluency games with my lower kids (they read with both other teachers so so much). My high kids do novel studies. 

Word work always has 3 choices and it's a mix of our spelling and vocabulary lists. I bought 3 blue tubs from Michaels and I just fill them with whatever choices I want to give them that week. They usually don't know what's in there until they choose one and open it. We do things like vocabulary hunt (use their vocabulary journal to find words that fill certain criteria), word worth (each letter is worth something), create a word search, sorts, and crosswords.

One thing that is always in the tub is Vocabulary Sentence Scramble. I got this idea from The Brown Bag Teacher and I couldn't recommend it more. My kids dive for this center every week and love it. All I do is use colored sentence strips to make sentences that use our vocabulary words, but the vocabulary word is a blank. Then, I cut the words apart. Each sentence goes in a baggie. Students work to unscramble the sentence and then fill in the missing vocabulary word. My students think it's a fun challenge and desperately try to be the first person to figure out and write all 8 sentences (sometimes it takes them all week!). At first I was nice and put capitals and periods and even put the number of letters the missing word had. Over time, I phase out the help and make the students "fix" the sentence in the end by adding correct capitalization and punctuation.

Again, Daily 5 in my room is student choice. I don't tell them where to go and I don't even really tell them what to get done. On Fridays, I will check and star things they did. I also pull out a few amazing pieces to put up in the room but I never really grade it. If they never do a Scribble Story, I'm not going to sweat it (although those are their favorite and I get about 40 a week). When I look up, I see students reading, writing, and working.

It works for us. 

After Daily 5, we reconvene for another mini-lesson. This is when I pull in writing. On Mondays, I do explicit writing instruction. Each week we focus on a type of writing. Last week we did Personal Narratives and this week we are doing How-To writing. Each Monday my students receive a rubric and a pre-writing graphic organizer. During Monday mini-lesson we go over the rubric, grade some examples, and go over the pre-writing paper. I write one and they grade mine (they love this!) Now they are ready to get started writing for the week! The rest of the week, I touch on grammar (connect it to writing), word work (connect it to writing), vocabulary (connect it to writing - see a theme?), and  anything else language related.

After this mini-lesson, my students break into forced rotation stations. They are split into 4 groups (blue, red, yellow, green). 

I love using my Smartboard to display what we are doing because if someone walks in, they immediately know what to do. 

Stations change every other day.

Ipad station usually stays the same - SpellingCity. I will probably only change this when my kids get bored of it - which hasn't happened yet.

Reading station: 

Monday/Tuesday: They listen to the Wonders curriculum story of the week (and read along). This way we don't take precious class time to listen to it but they have still heard it so we can talk about it.

Wednesday/Thursday: My students log on to Readworks.org and do their assignments. They love that it gives the immediate feedback and I love that I can assign them all different texts (so they're on their level) and the questions are deeper than simple recall (seriously recommend!) Some of the questions are even short response so my students have to think deeply.

Writing station: (a writing rotation lasts 2 weeks)

Monday/Tuesday: students complete their graphic organizer and illustrations for their writing

Wednesday/Thursday: students complete their first draft

Monday/Tuesday: Students use colored pencils to edit and revise their writing (make it better) and write a 2nd draft

Wednesday/Thursday: Students finalize their draft and publish it on SeeSaw.

My table:

Monday/Tuesday: I teach the vocabulary words at my table, students fill them into a TIP chart and put them in their TIP chart folder (school required activity but I like it)

Wednesday/Thursday: Since students have listened to the curriculum story of the week, they come ready to talk and answer questions about it. I write questions (higher level, open ended) on index cards and we just dive in. With only 5-6 kids I know each student is engaged, not just passing by. I can also differentiate the questions and supports for each group. 

Specials breaks up our stations nicely and I have the board up ready for them to come right back in and get started in their 2nd station. 

I love our reading block because I really feel I get to dive deep with each kid. By seeing them in smaller groups throughout the day, I am able to know that they're paying attention and I can take notes on who needs more help.

That's it for reading! Please be sure to check back for the post on math and problem of the day/morning meeting!

Happy OCTOBER!