Math With M&Ms!

I am coming to you in the midst of my weekend full of church.

Yesterday we had school Mass, as usual. Today I went to my twin nephews' first Communion. And tomorrow is one of my second graders' first Communion. The other four have theirs later this month.

Here's a picture from the first Communion after-party today!

Onto what this post is about!

Yesterday was M&M Math Day. While looking online for good ideas to use, I found a bunch of great M&M Math activity pages! There are a lot of different ways you can use M&Ms for math (graphing, probability, mean/median/mode, and so on), and the activities are written out super well. They aren't the cutest sheets ever, but they fit a TON of different things on each work page.

For first grade, I used Math Activity Page 1, which focused on sorting, counting, greater than/less than, and adding. With a little help from me to get them started, they were able to do the sheet very independently. And they had a lot of fun!

For second grade, I used Fraction Fun with M&Ms, which was a good review of fractions of a set. It also covered greater than/less than.

For both grades, we also did Math Activity Page 2, which actually focused on division with remainders. It didn't use those words, but that's what they were doing. It made me think that next year when I introduce division to the second graders, this would be a good way to do it. They were really into it! They all LOVED this page, especially because at the end they got to eat a few and write how many were left over. :)

I don't think the students expected to do quite so much math with their M&Ms... but they did really well with all of the activities.

One last little story...

My reading curriculum focuses on... I think 10 kids. All the stories are about those 10 kids. In first grade, there isn't an overarching plot that connects the stories together. There are just a bunch of stories about random stuff the kids do. The last unit I'm teaching is about the kids going to Super Happy Fun Land. In second grade, the stories take place within the context of a school year and it follows the trials and tribulations (and drama) of the kids in school.

Recently in our soap opera reading book, the kids' teacher got the flu and they had a substitute. The substitute had the students write get well poems for their teacher, and in my students' workbook, there was a little section for them to write their own get well poem for the pretend teacher.

One of the girls came up to me afterwards and said, "Read my poem I wrote... but don't read it out loud..." and I was like, "Okay?" So here is what it said:

Aw, I'm the best teacher in the world!

Hope you're having the best Saturday in the world today!!

Snow Snow Snow!!

Every time I go to write a new post, I click "New Blog" instead of "New Post"... just wanted to tell you that.

So we FINALLY got snow in Chicago. I took a picture of our calendar area to remember the day. The weather person was SO EXCITED to choose "Snowy" as the weather for yesterday. Also look how close we are to 100th day!

So last night, as the snow drifted from the sky, and the people on the radio assured me that there would be a snow day, I couldn't decide if I wanted one or not. I know that sounds weird. It's just that I had everything ready to go for today and I didn't want to push it back! Also I don't want to push back the 100th day party for logistical reasons!!

But the plows were ready and we had school! Here are some of my kiddos playing outside while I froze to death during morning recess. I swear those 15 minutes go slower than the entire rest of the day.

Instead of math stations today (much to the chagrin of my students), we did this fun comparing numbers activity that I pinned from Mrs. Patton's Patch!

Each student gets a white circle for each letter in their name. For example, I'd have 4 circles because my name is Jill. After writing one letter in each circle, they stack the circles up to make a snowman and make a few decorations. Then, they take a speech bubble and write a comparing sentence. They compared any name to any other name and had to write something like, "Jill has 1 more than Jim." They were really into this!

And this snowman cracks me up. All of the other snowmen had huge smiles and arms, and this one looks a little disturbed.

I was really happy with how easily they wrote their sentences! I only had to help one student with the "how many more" concept. Yay!