EGGcellent Fact Families

I love spring and it's a great time to add in some fun hands-on and interactive activities to get students moving. I created an egg hunt for my kids to do outside to review and reinforce fact families before Easter! {Of course, you can do this with any type of review questions, but for my students, I made up fact family problems}

Each egg had a group of numbers inside that made a fact family.  

My kids were broken into “teams” and each team had 12 eggs to find. They also had their own color to hunt for {this really helps with over competitive egg hunters}.

We did our hunt on the playground, but you could also do this in your classroom. Once their team found their 12 colored eggs, they came to me to get their recording sheet and they got to work!

The students solved their fact families on their recording sheet.  If you would like to try this idea with your students, you can download a copy of our recording sheet! 

 

Happy Easter Everyone!

Ninjas, Spiders and Pumpkins, Oh My!

So we all know that Halloween is at the end of the week…I mean how could I forget? My kids talk about it like 57398234 times a day! No matter what we are working on or discussing, they seem to find a way to include dressing up like a ninja into the conversation! Well you know what they say, if you can’t beat them, join them right? Well, I have to get a little creative when trying to incorporate “Halloween” into my teaching. (My school does not celebrate Halloween, and we do not teach in themes either…major bummer, I know!) So, I have been trying to squeeze in “Halloween” related material wherever I can!  Last week, we were working on fact and opinion. We spent some time reading books on spiders, and we watched the PebbleGo on “All About Spiders” to build some background. Then, we completed a fact and opinion sort on SPIDERS! They loved it, and more importantly, they did really well on it! If you would like to use our spider fact and opinion sort, just click the photo below!

We also started working on fact families last week. We talked all about how the fact family is related and, how they live in the fact family house. Well, this year – it just happens to be a fact family HAUNTED house! We did this little activity in our math journals. They got to pick a fact family and complete the facts inside, and then color the haunted house on the outside!

 

We also got to learn about the lifecycle of a pumpkin last week. We only spent a day on this, so we did not get to do much. We did read the book, From Seed to Pumpkin by Wendy Pfeffer and completed a pumpkin lifecycle cut and paste that can be found in my Lifecycle of a Pumpkin Set. Finally, we read a small reader from my set that reviewed the stages of the pumpkin lifecycle!

Have a Happy Halloween everyone!!

RTI and a freebie!

Does your school implement RTI? My school is implementing it for the first time this year and honestly, we are just learning as we go! I am an interventionist with a small group of babies that struggle with decoding words and reading fluently. They also REALLY struggle with rhyming words. I have heard that in order to read, kids must be able to rhyme, so we have been focusing a lot on rhyming for the last few weeks. We have been utilizing these rhyming flip books by The Printable Princess- they are awesome and the kids really love them! Do yourself a favor and check them out!

I also created these rhyming picture cards for my kiddos to practice with. They simply say the word of each picture on the card, and identify the two words that rhyme! If you’d like to use these to practice rhyming with your sweet babies, just click here! 

How do you implement RTI at your school? What are your favorite intervention strategies to use? I’d love to hear what works for you!