It's About Time!

Right now we're working on time in math. I have noticed that many students really struggle with elapsed time. Here are a few strategies I use that help them out:

• Use military time, and make sure to label your clock in it! This means that 12pm is really 13:00 (thirteen hundred hours), 1 pm is 14:00, and so on. It is much easier than having to remember to switch after 12:00.

• Label your clocks with minutes and important words (see picture above) and add key words. To the left side of the six, I suggest labeling "to, 'till the hour, until, before" and to the right, "past, after" 

• Use materials like a Judy Clock. They come with moveable arms that are connected to gears, so their movement is more authentic. Therefore, if you start the clock at 3:00 like the picture above, the minute hand will start to bring the hour hand along with it. That way when it's 3:30, the hour hand will be halfway between the 3 and the 4 (it's halfway to 4:00!) It really helps kids tell time close to the next hour (especially at 45 minute or more to the hour).
• Try these materials:
• Elapsed time flashcards

• It's About Time!
• Scholastic Time, Money, and Measurement
• Disney Time and Money Grade 2 (also find them at a dollar store or Target $1 bin!)
• Clock Bingo
• Lakeshore Elapsed Time Write & Wipe Boards (set of 10)

Try this elapsed time interactive from Shodor!

Select difficulty (easy Level 1 = only hours) and move the hands ahead by hours and / or minutes

Click the picture to download free telling time worksheets or create your own!

Check out my other math posts here.

Reading Strategy - Monitoring and Clarifying

I did a mini-lesson on monitoring and clarifying this week. I was pleasantly surprised when with the strategies my students gave for our anchor chart. Check it out!

One of the other resources I use for this is Explode the Code. It especially helps students who make visual errors when attempting to read words because it makes them look at the whole word and each of the sounds in the word. It's more of a phonics-based program, but it also has comprehension as you get into higher levels. I really like how it helps with syllabication, and thus, fluency!

Here are some sample pages provided by School Specialty. Please note the copyright! View by clicking on ONE of the images - they all link the same pdf.

Writing Anchor Charts

My class this year is by far my most advanced academically and best behaved, but their writing is a weakness. I would say one of my weaknesses was teaching paragraphing. I kept saying that students needed to change paragraphs when introducting a new character, having a change in setting, when an important event occurred, and when using dialogue between different "speakers." I kept pointing out how the authors of stories in our reading anthology changed paragraphs,  and asked students what the purpose of the paragraph change was.

Our CRT (Curriculum Resource Teacher - we're so lucky to have her, especially with the economy) also let me borrow her copy of Scholastic's Paragraph Power: 50 Engaging Mini-Lessons, Activities, and Student Checklists for Teaching Paragraphing Skills. My students slowly began to learn the difference between descriptive, expository, and narrative writing. They even began to include main idea beginning sentences and closing sentences, but they weren't really carrying the skill over from day to day...

I have realized why students are so poor at writing paragraphs now, and I think a big part of it is that we often use picture books or short stories in reading textbooks. You will often see that some books have one or two lines of text and no indention...essentially no paragraphs! We teachers also let their imaginations run wild and we don't want to overcorrect them because they finally write beyond a simple sentence in second grade...but they tend to feel that quantity is better than quality! Who hasn't experienced a student asking, "How long does it have to be? Is this enough?!" 

I also bought Teaching with Intention by Debbie Miller. Between that, Pinterest, and the Anchor Chart Linky Party I came across, my solution has been to create anchor charts and post them in the room. It's just not enough to put them on the Promethean Board and refer back to them occasionally! Our writing is slowly but surely improving. I am still having to force my students to pre-write though....hopefully it will  be less of a task in the near future!

Here are some writing anchor charts we have created as a class over the last few weeks.

Ideas for Beginning / Ending of a Story

Sorry it's so dark and messy!

Focus Trait: Organization

Paragraphing

How to Revise

Oops...I'll have to add some black to that yellow ink!

The Kamishibai Man

Our Journeys reading story next week is called the Kamishibai Man. This book is excellent to use as a mentor text (a book used to enchance writing instruction) to teach children about writing a cliffhanger ending. It is a story about the Japanese art of storytelling, and it explains how storytellers used to travel from village to village telling stories before books, libraries, television, and computers became popular and easy to access. If you teach using the Journeys program, it is excellent to compare to What Do Illustrators Do?

Here is author Allen Say with his Kamishibai Man presentation at Duke University.

Video of the past and present history of Kamishibai - stop at 1:32 for younger readers and writers

Video of Author Rebecca Kool reading and explaining her Kamishibai book The Fly Catcher Boy

Check out this excellent website with a compilation of mentor texts!

see my class website for more Kamishibai Man and other Journeys materials

Balance Scale Equalities and Inequalities

I know it sounds absurd, but no matter what age your child or student is (if they are old enough to be in school and doing math), you should be using the words "equality" and "inequality" to describe numbers that are equal or not equal. One simple way of doing this is to use a pan balance. You can differentiate these activities to use with students in K-8!

My students are regrouping when adding or subtracting 2 and 3-digit numbers. In order to help them understand that regrouping is not taking away or adding any numbers, but simply putting them in another place and form, I do something like this:

If you counted, you'd see ten cubes on one side and a rod (made of ten connected cubes) on the other side. The arrow points to the middle because the scale is balanced! 

To show greater than and less than, all you have to do is have the children count out the number of cubes and / or rods (or flats if you're working with hundreds) and see which side is heavier (goes down).

You can also do this with "missing number" or pre-algebra problems. Using the above picture, I would write a missing number sentence: 5 + __ = 10. Students would add cubes to the higher side (meaning that side of the scale is lighter, and thus represents a smaller number) until the balance showed both pans being equal. They would be able to find that 5+5=10. No more frustration, and no need to show students that they can use the inverse (10-5=___) to find the answer!

You can try this without having a pan balance or base-ten blocks / place value blocks at home...because I have found the websites for you! 

This site is called the Illuminations Pan Balance and it was created by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. You can start out by showing students how different shapes (instead of numbers) can have different masses. Therefore, the square is greater than / heavier than the triangle. I have used this with kindergarteners and they understand it! I used to have a worksheet that was made specifically for this site, but can't find it at the moment.

Next, you can show them that they have to add to the side that weighs less to balance it.

Students can reset the balance or complete different "sets" where the shapes have different masses OR you can have them try it with numbers.

As you can see, we just demonstrated the commutative property of addition - the order of the addends doesn't change the sum. We created an equality!

Now we've used the associative property of addition! 

Download some practice sheets here! This document is a pdf that includes harder problems and blank scales for students to create their own equalities.

Check out my other Making Math Memorable Posts!