An Introduction to Multiplication

Each year around Christmas time, my little Second graders begin begging me to learn multiplication!

It's funny to me... but Multiplication to them is seen as this big scary topic that makes you a Third grader. Because they're so excited to learn and challenge themselves, I love giving them an introduction to multiplication. It likewise allows me to continue challenging my higher performing students throughout the year in small groups, while giving my other students who are still struggling with 3 digit addition and subtraction a little taste of third grade confidence.

I always start my very first day with multiplication by using m&m's. Using Candy as a manipulative for Math makes the lesson seem more exciting! And because I rarely use food in the classroom, it makes it special too!



This year because I have five students who are allergic to nuts, I also used skittles!

Students use the m&m's and skittles to create "groups of". They write down the mutliplication problems that coincide with the candy they created. We slowly learn that multiplication is equal groups and that there is a relationship between multiplication facts with the same numbers. For example, 3 groups of 5 and 5 groups of 3 equal the same amount of candy pieces. Here you can see a picture of one of my student's work stations.

Students tend to catch on extremely quickly when multiplication is presented this way. I lead them through about 6 or 7 problems together and then let them play around with the candy, making their own math problems! The discovery aspect helps solidify their learning. They write the ones they find on the white board in front of the classroom and we clap for all the awesome work they've discovered at the end of class.

The next day, we use colorful beads and our fun whiteboards to continue discovering multiplication. I found these amazing ping pong boards in the "dollar spot" at Target one day and used them for fun paddle white boards. Again I lead them through a few problems, making sure to introduce them to the multiplication rules of 0 and 1. I then again let them explore.

 

By using fun manipulatives and materials and by making multiplication into a discovery, it becomes fun and manageable. Students can immediately feel successful and excited to keep learning. It also gets them excited to start learning Division! 

I love how this student used his white board to beg me to keep learning! Gotta love 2nd grade spelling too! ;)

Place Value Battleship

Today in Summer school, we played a little place value battleship! Students used Lakeshore Privacy Partitions to secretly hide their game boards. We used two 120 charts, some Target Dollar Spot erasers and some fun colorful beads to create a Place Value Review game.  Students started by setting up their game boards. They used the white chart to hide their "ships." They covered 5 numbers on their board with their erasers.

Rather than asking A16, or B7 to describe where you are hoping to sink a partner's ship, students asked by using place value clues. They would say 7 tens and 5 ones to describe 75. They would then record where they had asked on their gold chart by using a colorful bead. If they guessed a space with an eraser, they collected the eraser. The first person to collect all their partner's erasers won! 

For added Differentiation my higher students were paired together and encouraged to ask their partner by saying, "10 more than 7 tens and 5 ones" or "5 less than 7 tens and 7 ones." My higher students loved the challenge it added. 

Overall, the game was a big hit! We're definitely going to have to play it in the school year too! 

Shapes

Over the last few weeks, we've been working with shapes! Now I'll admit, teaching 2D and 3D shapes was one of those concepts that used to be somewhat tricky for me. I felt like I was one of those beginning  teachers, that unfortunately didn't know what else to do except encourage my students to memorize the different shapes. I'd hold up a shape and say, "So this is a triangle. Got it?" and hope to God that they did get it. 

I didn't have any manipulatives or games, direct instruction or even activities that made learning shapes easier or more enjoyable. I just hoped that my students would catch on eventually. 

Now I still don't have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to shapes, but I'm definitely doing better! I've found some incredible resources and have blog stalked many amazing teachers out there in the world and have borrowed some great ideas from them and come up with a few on my own. 

Here are some of the things I use now!

1. Geoboards: Who doesn't love rubber bands and little peg boards? My kids love love love the geoboards. I use them a lot in center work. I pair them with index cards that guide my students as to what shapes they need to create, so as to keep them focused and on task. 

2. Kinesthetic shape making: We go out to the grassy ground next to the playground and create different shapes using our bodies. We work in groups to create sides and angles. We take pictures by climbing to the top of the playground and using our iPad to snap aerial views. We then use doodle buddy or a drawing app on the iPad to label the sides, angles and vertices of the shapes we made in our pictures. 

3. Shape manipulatives: I printed these amazing pattern block templates from Jessica's Corner of Cyberspace and paired them with my shape blocks for a fun center. I created a name that shape graphic organizer to record their work. 

 

http://raebear.net/goodies/patternblocks/

4. The Greedy Triangle: We read the book, "The Greedy Triangle" and use Step into Second grade's awesome shape shifter activity found here. We paired the project she created with the fun app, "Chatterpix" and made the awesome videos below. 

Chatterpix

4. Captain Invincible and the Space Shapes: We also read the book, "Captain Invincible and the Space Shapes." We took notes in our math journals and practiced identifying the difference between a vertex, edge and face of a 3D shape.

 

5. Pic Collage: Then we used the app, "Pic Collage" to create picture collages of our 3D classroom shapes. I love how they turned out! There are some student examples below.

Pic Collage

I'm so glad that I've learned a few tricks. Not only do my students enjoy shapes more, but I definitely enjoy teaching them more too! What are some ways that you teach shapes? 

Fun with Math

For the last few years, I've struggled as a teacher to make math fun in the classroom. To be honest... I've been an extremely boring math teacher. I would teach a concept, have the kids work on it with me either in groups or on the board, and then I would give them a worksheet to work on independently (to prove that they got it). The only time I would use manipulatives would be during the initial teacher led lesson and even then, I tended to use virtual manipulatives on the computer, rather than hands-on ones. It was the same thing everyday... monotonous and boring.

As a result, I've made it my goal this year to make math more fun. Not only have I done my best to include math rotations more, so as to better address my students' differing math abilities, but I have used my ipads to integrate technology through the use of math apps like Mathletics, Scootpad, Sushi Monster and Hungry Fish.

I have also included time to work on Mountain Math, which is an amazing program that helps students progress through second grade math concepts that steadily increase in difficulty week to week.

And finally, I have been working on creating performance assessments for each of our math units through what I have been calling "Art" integrated Math. Rather than a boring old math worksheet or a solitary math test, I've been enticing my students to display their learning within art or through activities that show their learning.

Below are just some of the ways so far this year that I have done this.

Place Value Windows
After working with place value and learning about the many different ways that one can write a 3 digit numbers, students were asked to roll a dice 3 times to create a 3 digit number. They then had to create a place value window that depicted their number in four different ways. They had to write it in standard form, in expanded form, in word form and through place value blocks.

Body Graphing
An Expeditionary Learning favorite... create a graph with your body! Not only did we graph skittles and our favorite pizza on giant anchor charts, but we also created graphs with our bodies. First, we chose a topic. Then, we created a tally chart on the whiteboard of our favorite sports or activities. We then pushed all the desks aside and created a life size graph on the floor of the classroom. Students chose a topic and sat on the ground like a rising bar graph or a pictograph. They loved it! I finished the activity by asking the kids lots of questions, analyzing our body graph and had the kids create a drawing of what we had just made, explaining to their parents the results.

Ice Cream Comparing
This was actually an amazing activity that my partner teacher shared with me. Every kid seems to be introduced to greater than or less than signs through the monster or alligator teeth. Why not solidify those signs with ice cream cones!? Obviously you want your ice cream cone to contain more ice cream!

Math Detectives

When learning about Math patterns, students became Math detectives. They were split into groups and given magnifying glasses with "clues" (I used a white board marker to write +3, or +2, or -4 on small plastic magnifying glasses.) They then had to match the clues with the correct mystery pattern.  The next day they had to create their own mystery pattern, and create a paper magnifying glass clue that lifted up to reveal the answer. I wish I had taken pictures of their final projects, but they were so excited to take them home to test their parents that I forgot. 

Educreations

Educreations is an amazing iPad app that can be used to assess a student's ability to complete the steps of a math problem. Students create their own videos, where they not only talk through the problem but also solve a problem. My students love creating these videos, and sharing them with the class. 

Learn more at the website...http://www.educreations.com

Mr. Bones loves Addition

Because it's almost Halloween and we've been working diligently on solving three digit addition problems with and without regrouping. I created this fun skeleton project to act as our art integrated math for Addition. Students were given a pre-made template copied on white construction paper of a skeleton. Each of his bones had a different 3 digit addition problem. Students had to solve each problem correctly before they could cut the skeleton out and assemble him. I have never seen kids work so hard at math! They turned out soo cute too! Can't wait to make "Mr. Turkey loves Subtraction!"

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All and All I'm doing my best to make Math more fun, more engaging and more meaningful this year! It's just a start, but I know at least I'm having more fun. I'll post more ideas soon! If you have any great ideas, let me know!

 ;)

Multiplication

We've been doing so much in Second Grade lately that I have so many posts to write! Below are the Multiplication Stories we wrote when we finished learning our 2's times tables. We spent a lot of time discussing the language of multiplication and learning how to answer and illustrate multiplication word problems. Therefore, when we finished learning our 2's, we worked on the project below. It was a quick project and only took us a day to complete. 

I got the idea over a year ago on Pinterest. Unfortunately I didn't actually pin the idea, so thank you so much to whoever pinned this idea originally. It was a great way to solidify the concept of groups in Multiplication and give them a sense of ownership in their learning.