Math Workshop and Making 10

Our class has been spending the past week and a half on both getting our math workshop/math stations underway and exploring facts to 10 in different ways. We started the school year with whole group math lessons and a big counting project (see a previous post). We are now transitioning into our math workshop model where we will start each math class with a whole group math meeting (where we will review number sense in different ways) and/or a mini-lesson connected to a new topic. After our whole group meeting the students split into three different groups and begin math stations. The stations will be "teacher," (generally working on an activity directly related to the day's lesson) "technology," (using our chromebooks or iPads to do math games and practice -- this week kids have been using a great iPad app called "wet, dry, try" to practice penmanship of their numbers) and "independent," (which will typically be a partner math game station).

As we begin stations we are also working on exploring facts to 10. We came up with the addition facts that make 10 and charted them in different ways in order to help us become familiar with the facts and notice patterns (such as the "turn around facts" ie -- 8+2, 2+8). The students have also been playing lots of great partners games to reinforce these facts. Here is one great partner game for practicing facts to 10 that you can try easily at home. Take 10 pennies, show them to your partner, have the partner close his/her eyes, and grab some of the pennies (hiding them in your hands or under a cup in front of you). Have your partner open his/her eyes, count how many pennies are still visible, and tell you how many you have hidden by using what he/she knows about our facts to 10 (or using fingers to help at first). You can then let your partner check if he/she was correct. The students in our class are getting very good at this game! The game could work well for other facts too just by changing the number of pennies you start the game with.

Below are some photos of kids working on different "make 10" activities in math stations.

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