Subtraction Action! Fun Games to Play in Your Classroom...with a FREEBIE!

Hello, poor, neglected little blog. It always inevitably happens at various busy points during the school year. We've been super busy here in our little kindergarten class, working hard at learning how to do subtraction! I've got a sharp bunch of kiddos this year, so they've picked up on it fairly quickly. One of my favorite videos to show to introduce subtraction is "When You Subtract With a Pirate" by Harry Kindergarten. They LOVE this song... and so do I! My neighbor teacher and I can never get it out of our heads once we start showing it in our classrooms. I love how he uses subtraction vocabulary in his song and includes some fun pirate word problems as well. If you've never seen it before.... it's your lucky day!

My students were literally singing the chorus at the top of their lungs on Friday. It was the cutest thing.
We started out by doing some activities to help practice taking "one" away from a certain number. I paired the kids off and we played a game called "Lose a Cube!" To play, one student has a train of cubes with a specific number.

Then, their partner says, "Lose a cube!" and they take away one cube from the train.

After that, the other partner writes the number sentence to show and solve the subtraction problem they made with their cube train.

They continue to play the game with different numbers of cubes on the train; taking away 1 every time. My students enjoyed it so much that they asked me if they could play it as a fast finisher activity later in the week if they ever finished their work early! Music to this teacher's ears!

After a few days of putting our subtraction skills into practice, I was feeling a bit stagnant in how we had been practicing creating and solving number sentences, so I came up with a fun little game called Flower Power Subtraction! I made a flower with 10 petals and labeled each one with numbers 1-10. Then I created a stem and made 10 leaves to go it. 

Every number sentence created with this game is taking away from 10. One student throws a beanbag onto the flower. Whatever number it lands on, that's how much we subtract from 10.

Whoever threw the beanbag removes that many leaves from the stem. Since this one landed on 8, this student is taking 8 leaves off of the flower to see how many we have left over.

Then, using whiteboards, they wrote the number sentence to show their work! (I realize this isn't the number sentence that matches the picture above, but you get the idea).

They had SO much fun playing this game... they begged me to play it again! So for the next day, I whipped up a quick little recording sheet to go with it. You can download it for free by clicking on the picture below!

To switch the game up a bit, we also played it so that one student threw a beanbag on the flower and another rolled a dice. They had to decide which number was more, then create a subtraction problem using the 2 numbers we landed on. It was a quick little mini-lesson on how the bigger number always has to come first in our subtraction problems!

I'll probably roll this game out a few more times during our math time this week. I love when a new idea works out with the kids so well! They are getting faster and faster at solving their number sentences. Happy Sunday, everyone! Hope you have a great week.

Five for Friday.. a day late!

Five for Friday! One of my favorite linkys.. and I have met some new wonderful bloggers through it, too! Thanks to Doodlebugs Teaching for creating such a fun weekly post!

1. It was my birthday on Tuesday! I turned 29... My little class spoiled me and kept singing to me at different times throughout the day. They were as excited as if it were their own birthday! Love them.

2. We love using Deedee Wills' fabulous math journal prompts every month! They've gotten so good at solving word problems thanks to her math journal products! You should really check them out! I love how this kiddo's drawing turned out.. and he added the number sentence at the bottom all on his own! I was a proud teacher.

3. The weather has been absolutely perfect in Arizona this week, so one afternoon during our math block we trekked outside to do a little sidewalk chalk subtraction! I would call out a number sentence and they solved it how they knew best: brain, pictures, or fingers! They were confused at first though... some were asking, "How do I erase it??" "You mean we leave it here forever??" Haha.

4. A kinder friend left this little note on her white board for me to find when I returned to my table on Friday. Kindergarten is the best grade ever when you want a little self-esteem or ego boost! Ha!

5. I am participating in the Spring Cleaning sale this weekend! My wishlist is packed and I'm going to use this chance to get some of it off of there and into my hot little hands! You can get 20% off everything in my store today and tomorrow! Click on the picture below to go straight to my store!

Thanks to Krista Wallden for the super cute graphic!

When You Subtract With a Pirate....

Good afternoon! I wanted to take a moment to blog about my kiddos' current favorite video obsession at the moment - When You Subtract With a Pirate, by Harry Kindergarten! Does anyone else use his AMAZING videos in their classroom? My kids can't get over any of them, but this is the one they are begging me for at the moment:

This song is so fun, even my teaching neighbor and I were singing it practically every day for a week. It's a great little way to teach your students about subtraction! The song is pretty long and includes word problems. After we had learned and sung the song for a few days, I gave my kids some white boards and each time the video came to one of the word problems, I would pause it and the kids would write and solve the number sentence on their own. Then I'd continue playing the video so they could check their work and see if they were right!

I began to notice that it helped my kiddos start to solve their subtraction number sentences more quickly and more were able to solve it mentally without having to draw a picture when we got to our independent practice.

I really love using all of his videos in my kinder class! They are so fun and fantastical!