Five for Friday March 22nd edition!

Quick update before I have to run off to meet some friends... I'm participating in this week's Five for Friday linky with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

1. I'm excited to say that I've created and posted a new decomposing numbers activity pack in my little store on TPT... it's called "How Many Ways?" and has activity sheets for decomposing numbers 3-9. It really helped my kinders understand the concept of building numbers in various ways! If you want to check it out, click on the link in the picture below -- it's on sale till midnight tonight!

2. Conferences! This week was conference week so I was knee-deep in those... we do student led conferences in the spring and it is so fun to see the kids lead their parents on a tour of their learning... they get so excited to be the "teacher"!

3. Since St. Patrick's Day was on a Sunday this year, we've been catching up this week and doing some leprechaun-themed activities. My kids did a cute little leprechaun addition craftivity where they created a number sentence with gold coins and filled out the word problem to match! Sadly I didn't take a picture before I left school today, but rest assured it was adorable. ;)

4. I think I've talked about this my last few Five for Fridays... but I went to another spring training game today with some of my teacher buddies! We had a half day due to conferences and skedaddled out of there to catch a game right down the road! The weather was absolutely PERFECT for it, too... 80 degrees and breezy!

5. As for tonight, I'm off to the Phoenix Suns game with some friends, but we aren't really excited to see the Suns... we are more excited for the concert that is following the game with one of my favorite artists, Phil Wickham!

Till next time, friends! Here's to a restful weekend!

Decomposing Numbers & a new activity pack!

I don't know about y'all, but decomposing numbers has been a difficult concept for my students to grasp this year! They had been doing well with addition concepts, but when it came down for them to break down the numbers and tell me how many ways they could build it, they kept getting stuck. In hopes of helping my students master the concept, I created activity sheets called "How Many Ways?" for numbers under 10 to help them have both a visual, hands-on, and written representation of numbers. The first 2 days we did the activities with counters, it was a slow, slightly painstaking process. However, by the third day the lightbulb turned on, and my kids were able to complete the activities independently! After they had their big assessments, which included showing different ways to make a number, I flipped straight to that section of the test to find that they did AMAZING! Nearly every single one of my students got every one of those questions right. It was such a great feeling to know that an activity I created really helped them grasped the concept 100%! (Cause, as we all know, not everything we try in the classroom works, as much as we'd like that to be the case!)

Here it is in action:

To help my students keep track of the number sentences they had created and ensure that they didn't make the same one twice, I created checklists for each number. As they created each number sentence, they found it on the checklist and crossed it off.

Double-sided red/yellow counters worked wonderfully with this concept. To make it simpler for my kids, I had them start with the counters all on the same color to record the number sentence. To make the next one, they were only allowed to flip over one counter at a time. This also was helpful to keep them on track for decomposing the numbers in different ways.

I shared these activities with my kinder team and they told me that I just HAD to post in on TPT - so I created a new little activity pack with all of the sheets you see here, plus more! I have included printable red/yellow counters for you to create your own if you do not have the plastic ones seen here. I also made the activity sheets on legal sized paper so the kids had plenty of room to show their work. Here is a preview of the "How Many Ways?" pack available in my store:

To check out this product in my store, click on the picture below! It will be on sale (15% off!) until Friday!