I was all set to assess place value this past week, and move on to addition and subtraction next week, when I realised that we hadn't 1) practised drawing Base 10 (diennes) representations of numbers or 2) rounded numbers to the nearest 10/100.

We had a bit of a crazy week, with different activities added here and there (plus we have our Class Assembly next week, so we are practising like mad), so maths time was more abbreviated than normal this week. We did manage, however, to practise drawing Base 10 representations of numbers, and I introduced the idea of rounding to the nearest 10 today.

Awhile ago, I found this very cute (and versatile) Mystery Number game on TPT (Teachers Pay Teachers). It's by Love to Learn, and best of all - it's FREE! It's also differentiated, as there are cards for TU, HTU and ThHTU. Perfect! I've been using it in a variety of different ways throughout our unit on place value.

Originally, I introduced the cards by playing a game in my small groups. I put the kids in pairs, then I read out a 'Mystery Number' (e.g., My mystery number has 4 in the Tens place and 8 in the units place). The first pair to build their number using Base 10 materials won a point. This was very popular!

The cards then moved to a station, where they had to draw a card from a bucket, then record their number on a recording sheet (the download includes a few different types of recording sheets, so you can take your pick). This works as a nice little assessment, to see who is getting the place value concepts, and who may be struggling a bit.

I also wanted to use the Mystery Number cards to get the kids to draw Base 10 representations of numbers (while also double checking their ability to identify and write the correct number from the 'Mystery Number' description), so I created my own recording sheets (below). They are differentiated for my 3 different groups - I have one group working with TU, another working with HTU and a third working on ThHTU:

I've also made recording sheets so I can use the same mystery number cards to get the class to practice rounding to the nearest 10 (again, differentiated for my 3 different maths groups). I'm only including a snapshot of one of the recording sheets included in the file, though, so the image will be bigger and easier to see:

Visit Teachers Pay Teachers to get your own set of Mystery Number cards (remember - the TPT download is FREE), then come back here to pick up the extra recording sheets to use with them (both the Base 10 drawing and rounding to the nearest 10 recording sheets are in the single file).  

If you think of any additional ways to use these Mystery Number cards, let me know. It saves so much storage space when the same resource can be used in multiple ways!

As I've moved from P1 to P3 this year, I've been aware that I need to think more about how I adapt and stretch the ways I teach reading comprehension.

As a P1 teacher, while reading comprehension is always important, you spend much of your time, at least initially, focusing on the phonics side of things. Children need to be able to decode before they can read for understanding! But when your class of P3 children arrive one morning in August for the first time, they come equipped with a basic to good (depending on the child) understanding of letters and many phonemes. While the phonics work will obviously be on-going, the children are reading more widely, and they are beginning to read for information.

I feel like P3 is a transition year in many ways - their last year in infants, before transferring to the middle stages. Because I've been steeped in the P1, heavy on phonics mind set for the past few years, I decided to sign up for a twilight course this past week, looking at teaching reading comprehension in the middle and upper stages. While not all of my class will be ready for some of the ideas and suggestions, I do have a group that could easily be pushed on.

The course was very practical, and the course leaders were both knowledgeable and helpful. They introduced us to the website The Learning Zoo, which is worth a look, I think. Here is a link to a free 'Teachers' Checklist' from the site, which helpfully breaks down all of the literacy Es and Os for each level - I'm planning to print it out to add to my planning folder. I think it will make creating learning intentions and success criteria quite straightforward, but it's also helpful as a checklist for ensuring that I'm covering a broad range of learning intentions under the umbrella of each Literacy E and O.

At the training, the facilitators also talked about using 'Task Maps' with different reading groups. A task map looks like this:

In the middle square, you have the name of the text the children are reading. In the surrounding squares, you put in a variety of tasks for the children to complete. What I really like about this, is that as you are filling in the different tasks, you can make sure you are including tasks that allow the children to practice the different reading comprehension strategies you are teaching during whole class and small group reading sessions.

I think this will be helpful with one of my guided reading groups in particular. Once they have been trained in how to use their Task Maps, this should free me up to spend a bit more time with my groups who need a little bit more support.

The Learning Zoo has a section with some Task Maps for different books already uploaded and ready to use. But even if the tasks maps there won't work for your class, they give you a good idea of the different types of tasks you can include if you want to create and share your own maps for different books available in your own school. Other teachers at the twilight said that once they got into the swing of creating their own tasks maps, they were not as time consuming to make as they might look at first...here's hoping I find that to be true! 

At the moment, my class is reviewing Stage 2 phonemes as part of North Lanarkshire's Stage 3 programme. As we are currently covering 3 phonemes a week, and I have 2 different phonics groups, our 'Phoneme Display Wall' is getting a bit crowded! It will be much easier once we are down to 2 phonemes (one per group) each week.

This is the first year I've used my expanded flashcards, which are far more structured than the flashcards I've used in years past. I'm finding it very helpful to have cards for both the base words, and the compound words that build on them. Depending on the phoneme, sometimes there are more or fewer of these. AW (in the picture) didnt' have as many base word/compound word pairs as some of the other sets. But it's still helpful to display them together, I think.

When I'm introducing a new phoneme, I use the flashcards, getting the kids to read each one as a class. I make sure to put them in difficulty order before we start, and I pair up the base word/compound word pairs. This is really helping kids use 2 decoding strategies: 1) findings words within words and 2) using syllables. And it's great to see some of the kids who find reading more tricky be successful with long, 'hard' words.

I keep the 'Phonemes of the Week' displayed near my teaching station all week. Then at the end of the week, I move them to our reference wall (see the picture below). This wall is big, but will fill up fast, so at the moment, I am choosing 4 words for each phoneme to leave on semi-permanent display. I've been trying to pair up base words with words that build on them (comb/honeycomb, or knock/knocking) for this, to reinforce the use of the 2 decoding strategies above.

If you are using these cards in your own class, I'd love to know how you are using them, and any ideas you have for making them a more effective teaching tool!

Last week, in reviewing Stage 2 words the class learned last year, we were going over 'would' and 'could'. Very tricky words - if you try to sound them out, you will definitely spell them the wrong way.

But mnemonics are great - we all know 'big elephants can always upset small elephants for 'because', right? So when I first started teaching, I made up a silly mnemonic (sillier ones are easier to remember, I think) for would/could/should. I teach it to my class every year, and I don't usually have problems with kiddos remembering how to spell these words (in our spelling assessment on Friday, only 1 child spelled 'would' wrong - and that child got 'could', funnily enough. Who knows what was going on there?).

So - for 'would', we remember 'Would otters upset lucky ducks?' To change it to 'could', we just remember 'Could otters upset lucky ducks?', and 'should' becomes, 'Sh...otters upset lucky ducks!'

Easy peasy! The kids really do remember it, just like they remember the elephant mnemonic for 'because'. If you try it and it works for your class, let me know!

This is a great little game I've been using in my class to work on number fact fluency. I use this in conjunction with Number Talks (see the 'Books' section to find out more), so that I'm helping kids develop addition strategies other than counting on their fingers (or counting all of the dots on the dice).

The game is simple. I keep my counting cubes separated into different colours, and I have several of these little blue jelly moulds (from Home Bargains) that I keep different colour cubes in. This game comes in a 2 dice version and a 3 dice version (a bit more challenging). The picture is of the 3 dice version.

Kids play in pairs (or in trios, if you have an extra kid). The first one rolls 3 dice and adds them up. They then cover the total number with a cube (so 6 + 4 + 2 would cover '12'). The next player then plays. If they roll a 12, they 'Bump' the other player off (remove their cube and replace it with one of their own). If they roll a different number, they can cover it with a cube.

As you can see in the picture, one number is covered with 2 cubes. If you roll the same total twice (or more times!) you can add an extra cube. Once that happens, that number is 'safe', and you can't be bumped off. At the end of the game, the player with the most numbers covered wins.

Kids really enjoy this little game, and so many kids need engaging ways to practice their number facts. The pictures below are clickable (you only need to click one picture - both pictures will take you to the same file, which contains both versions of the game), or you can get your copy of the game here.

One caveat - this really works best if you are combining this game with number talks that teach kids different strategies for adding. If they are just counting the number of dots on the dice each time, it isn't going to be as effective at improving number fact fluency. I usually teach this game initially in small groups where I can observe and encourage them to use addition strategies. We play it (with me observing) several times before I move it out to be an independent station.

Any questions, please ask! And if you use this, I'd love to hear how it works in your own class.

A couple of posts ago, I wasn't able to upload some OA and MB writing prompts because of difficulties with Adobe Acrobat. My husband has fixed that problem for me, so here are a couple of writing prompts I've been using with my class. I hope they might be helpful for someone else as well.

We've been looking at 'Picturing Peacock' (visualisation) as a reading comprehension strategy, so we've linked that reading strategy into our writing. How can we write interesting descriptions that help our readers to visualise our story?

Last week, my 2 phonics groups were working on OA and MB respectively, so I made writing prompts for a goat and a lamb. While we practice our phonemes, we can also practice writing descriptions (there is so much to fit in, I always like it when I can do 2 things at once). Both of the files give you two options for the prompts. You can either use the full page prompt (with a back page with extra lines if needed) - I use these when I plan to hang the finished writing up on the wall or on a washing line strung across the room), or you can use the slips of paper - just cut out a prompt for each child and have them paste it into their jotter as a reminder of what you are looking for from their description.  

Last week on my Facebook page, I linked to a blog post about the benefits of unstructured creative art time. It was there to make me feel a bit braver about the free for all I planned to attempt with my class this week...

Well - we spent our afternoon re-reading The Kapok Tree, and re-creating it on our Topic Wall. You can see the results (still a work in progress) above. The children did so well, and really took ownership of the different tasks. Each table was assigned 2 different animals/people/plants to make. They all knew that when they were finished with their 'big' animals, they should start making leaves and vines to put up. Everyone was really engaged, and I gave very little direction (I did have 2 additional adults in the classroom, which was a great help).

You can see a few labels (on the Kapok Tree, the anteater and the sloth). Further label cards will be available throughout the week, so children can make labels for the other animals when they are finished with other work. We'll also keep out the brown, green and coloured paper, so children can continue to make vines, leaves and flowers to add to our rainforest.

This was a great reminder to me that it's usually worth it to trust our kiddos and let them express themselves creatively! In the pictures below, you can see the man and anteater as 'works in progress' (left and right pictures respectively). In the middle is a close up of the man with an axe and the rainforest boy.

We are currently reading The Magic Tree House - Afternoon on the Amazon as a class read aloud. During one of our read alouds at the end of last week, I introduced our next reading comprehension strategy: Picturing Peacock.

This strategy is essentially visualisation - encouraging kids to visualise (picture) what is happening, the setting, etc, when they are reading. Visualisation strengthens kids' re-telling skills; as they picture what is happening, they actively engage with the text, which boosts their recall of the story. It's fun to see - as I reminded them to picture what was happening in the book, I could see lots of kids closing their eyes and doing just that. And I'm finding that when I ask them to tell me what they are visualising, they are beginning to give me more detail as they retell bits of the story (we'll just need to work on getting those bits in the right order!).

Visualising is a fun strategy, which is one reason I picked it next. But I also chose it in conjunction with looking at where the class needs to go with their writing.
As I looked at the writing we've done over the first couple of weeks of school, a lot of the kids can structure a simple story, using connecting words, quite well. But there isn't a lot of detail, and there is not much 'scene setting' before we jump straight into the story 'problem'. So it made sense to me to pick a Reading Comprehension Strategy that they could also use as a writing focus. If we want our readers to visualise our story (to help them understand what is happening better), we need to set an effective scene.

So during both our taught writing, and our phoneme tasks this week, my class will be writing descriptions that set the scene for a story. We will be learning to write in a way that lets our readers picture what is happening.

So tomorrow, we'll be setting the scene for a Jack and Annie adventure on the Amazon. The Magic Tree House book is great for giving lots of simple examples of scene descriptions that the class can duplicate in their own writing.

We are also learning the phonemes 'OA' and 'MB' this week. Our 'OA' group will describe the setting for a goat story, while our 'MB' group will set the scene for a story about a lamb. Unfortunately, I'm having a problem with opening Adobe at the moment, so I haven't been able to save my templates to a PDF to upload. If you are interested in having them, though, check back in a couple of days. My technical consultant (husband!) is trying to sort the problem for me.

When I'm able to upload the files, there will be both a full page template with an additional page of writing lines you can print on the back (if you want to display the writing - I always displayed on a washing line, as we are open plan, and there is no wall space). I'm planning on using the individual strips this week (middle picture below). Ech child will get 1 strip of paper, which they can paste into their jotters as a reminder of what their task is, and what I'm looking for in their description. Then they can complete the task in their Daily Writing jotters (saving a few trees along the way).