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! ;)

A Crowley Christmas

Thanks for being so patient with me this year! Here are the picture worthy activities of December! We did so many fun things in such a short time!

At the beginning of December we read the book, "The Biggest Christmas tree ever" by Steven Kroll. If you've never read it before, it's about two mice who fall in love with the same tree. It's a great book to teach character perspective, which is what we worked on in December. After reading it, my students discussed how everyone thinks their Christmas Tree is the biggest and best and how perspective and point of view plays into your opinions. They then created their own Christmas trees! 

This was my favorite project we did this December. I found these on a website online and just loved them. The directions are here. We learned all about the birth of Jesus and then created these beautiful stain glass nativity scenes. We hung them in our windows so that everyone could enjoy them! 

I love their little hands holding them up to the light. 

We also created an advent chain that we hung in the window too. We learned all about the four weeks of advent and what they stood for. I then handed out three purple and one pink strips of paper to each kid. They had to write four different ways they were going to prepare for the birth of Jesus. We attached all the pieces together and created a chain that hung throughout the three huge windows into my classroom. It reminded us throughout the month to ready our hearts for his coming.

Here you can see the pinecone Christmas trees that we created as one of the two gifts we made our Parents for Christmas. Attached to the tree we tied Diamante poems. You can see an example of one of the ones the kids wrote below.

  The poem was a great  way to review parts of speech! They had to include 2 nouns, 4 adjectives, 6 verbs and one phrase about Christmas time.

The other gift we created was a Christmas cookbook. Each child wrote a recipe for something they love that their parents make them for dinner. It was a complete secret and they had to write the recipe from memory. It was great way to practice writing directions in proper sequence. It was also wonderful to see their interpretation of what their parents did to make them food. We took all of their recipes and bound them into a book that they gave their on Christmas morning. 

Chocolate Cursive! At my new school cursive is taught starting in January of Second grade. My partner teacher, Lisa, and I decided to get out some of those pre-Christmas break wiggles by practicing cursive strokes in chocolate pudding. The kids loved it! What a great Hook to start learning cursive!  

We also worked with adjectives in December. We added them to our writing to paint vivid pictures in our readers' heads and even created our own Christmas Adjective tree to spruce up our classroom for the Holidays. (wink* wink* pun intended!) Each child created their own adjective ornament. 

In the last week of school before break, we had two parties. We celebrated as a class with our room moms and also celebrated with our fifth grade buddies. Our fifth grade buddies helped us make Nutter Butter reindeer while we watched a Christmas song sing-a-long video. Some of them turned out super cute. Unfortunately, most of them were eaten before I had a chance to snap a picture. 

During our class party, our room moms helped us create these adorable donut snowmen too! Who doesn't love eating adorably made Christmas snacks!? Can't wait to make the snowmen again next year! They were delicious :D.

In Math we worked on Multiplication. We used m&m's and cheerios to create arrays and make equal groups to learn multiplication.  

We then created these adorable Christmas lights to practice and memorize our 2's times tables. 

December was such a busy Month! We also celebrated our First Reconciliation! I love getting to be a part of their overall preparation for the sacraments. It's so special! Our school requires that we test their memorization of the Act of Contrition. The picture above shows how nervous they were for it! I found this paper in our turn in box. So adorable! 

First Reconciliation Resource

Finally, my students worked on Character perspective in the month of December. We culminated our study by creating our own stories. The kids chose to write the story of Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer from either Santa or Rudolph's perspective. We practiced using personal pronouns and adjectives in our writing. When they finished every step of the Writing Process and were ready to "publish" it (Hang it on our wall), they were given the chance to create these cuties to hang with their writing. They made my classroom so festive! 

Hope you and your family had a great Holiday! <3

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.