Math was fine this week. We started doing more place value work while working on “The T-Shirt Factory” Context for Learning unit by Cathy Fosnot. It’s always an interesting one, but I actually didn’t do it with my class last year. We weren’t ready for it until much later than this and when we were ready for it…I forget what we did instead.
This week was Halloween. That means an interrupted day on Thursday because of the Halloween Parade. I anticipated a day of difficulty on Friday as well, and while we’re at it, let’s just admit that Wednesday wasn’t going to be easy either. See how hard it is to stay on schedule? That’s why we didn’t exactly stay on schedule with the unit. However, I didn’t skip math any of those days – even the snow day on Friday!
I did a fun mapping activity with a Halloween theme one day when I was pulled out for a meeting, and we did a lot of work with the base ten blocks. But every single day I made sure that we were doing a Number Talk.
During a Fosnot unit, there will be a lot of Number Strings. But when I am not teaching a specific skill and want to review things that I hope everyone already knows or that I know they need to practice, I go back to Number Talks. This week we used some from the Grade 2 section of the book “Number Talks” by Sherry Parish. We started with single digit numbers and I found out on day one that most everyone understands commutative property. I repeated a talk that would reinforce this with double digit numbers on the second day. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we talked about the “doubles plus 1/doubles minus 1” strategy. These strategies are now displayed on our math wall so we can refer to them often.
This week, I am doing Number Strings to support the learning in the unit. Because I can barely remember what day it is on most days I have to write my numbers on a Post-it note. These will sit on my lap top all week or I will lose them. I find it also has me thinking many times during the day about what we are doing in math, which is good for my brain.
Some of these are from the unit and some are from my head. I know my learners well enough at this point that I’m sure we will need to do practice the skills that are in these strings multiple times. They’ll be practicing them while doing the work in the unit as well.
I’m going to finish off my planning today by making my anecdotal record sheet for this unit. (Just double checked and I already made one a few years ago! WOOHOO!