A Look At Last Week --freebie included!

We had fun last week catching up on Groundhog's Day and making Valentine crafts. I wasn't able to link up for Five For Friday so I thought I'd just share a bit of what we did last week and maybe include a freebie for you! 

We started our week of with Groundhog's day. Unfortunately due to the crazy weather the week before, it was only a short, quick lesson. We made Groundhog's hats and read weekly readers and even watched a video. That was about it. Short and sweet. 

During math, we are working on addition and subtraction and I wanted my kiddos to understand what those terms mean. We've done this quite a bit with cubes or counters but this time I wanted them to use a "mat" to help them "see" that adding means to put together and subtraction means to take away. We also use these boxes to help "decompose" numbers.
 

As you can see in the pictures, I gave each student a work mat. Simple to make, just draw a line down one side and divide it up. 

In the top picture, students were told to put two counters in ONE box and then put two counters in the other box. 

Once I saw that each student did that, then they were to bring the counters in both boxes down, which put them all together in the large rectangle. So we talked about how 2 and 2 make 4 in all. 

We continued with a few more problems.

 We continued with more problems in this picture.


Once we were ready to "break" or decompose numbers. So I had them turn the paper upside down, so the large rectangle was at the top and the two boxes were at the bottom.

They were told to put a certain amount of cubes in the large rectangle...such as 5. Then they had to "break" that 5 apart and put so many cubes in one of the boxes and the rest of the cubes in the other box. So one student might have put 2 in one box and 3 in the other. So 5 can be 2 and 3.

Does this make sense?

I didn't have pictures of them doing this part. 


During the week we also worked in our new small groups. After DIBELS testing was complete, I rearranged my students by their TRC levels. My lowest group is still working on beginning sounds and print concepts. So we had fun practicing beginning sounds with a set of puzzles from my Beginning Sounds Bundle pack.  

And we had fun creating some Valentine crafts. You can grab this freebie over on my FB page under Fan Freebies.

We've been also working on sequencing/retelling stories but this post is long enough so I'll be back this week with our activity using a flow map and Goldilocks and the Three Bears!