Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Mathulators :)

First of all... Kudos to you who are supper bloggers!  I don't know how you do it.  I'm lucky to get one post in each week - as you can see.  As hectic the start of the year has been, it has been a wonderful start.  I have modeled my groups and the right way, as well as the wrong way, to work in stations and today was the first day that we practiced the whole thing.  My kiddos did great.  We had four stations... one was with me, another one was math match (a game like memory or concentration), there was as station where students rolled the biggest number and the last one was Mathulators! The kids loved these.
I got the idea from 4th grade frolics vocabulators.  At her site she refers to Melissa Forney's site where you can order the jars.  This site used this idea with Language Arts... this didn't help me because I currently teach primarily math and science.  So, I turned it into mathulators.  Check out the pictures:

Here are the two that I made.  I wanted to find inexpensive ways to do this so I found two different containers at the dollar store. 

This one is filled with Nerds - my kids all wanted to eat them.  You can kinda see the words on the pink and blue paper.  These are words to go with our first unit of place value and numeracy.  Students had to find all the words and write them down.  For my struggling readers this helps to work with the words.


This one is a little bigger.  It has bath salts and stones in it, both came from the dollar store.  Inside this one there are cards that say a + 6 = 9 and b x 8 = 40 and c... and so on.  Students had to find the value of each letter.  This was a great day and a successful activity.  Hope your classrooms are having as much success!

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