I have the students gather in a circle on the carpet. I will be using place value dice (10s and 1s) for this activity. I have included a quick video (Seeing the Dice) so that you could see exactly what dice the students are using.
"Today we are going to see how well you know your neighbors. Not the neighbors you live next to but rather the number neighbors. The game will be played in teams of two (or three if you have an odd amount). The first person will roll the green and white dice and then state the number rolled. The second player must then state the number before and after the rolled number. Remember the number before and after are considered the neighbor numbers."
I have included a video of two students modeling this game (Modeling Neighbor Numbers).
Although this activity doesn't have students rote counting by 1s, it does ask them to produce numbers before and after a given number. In this case, they are demonstrating their mastery of knowing the number sequence between 1-99 (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.NBT.A.1).
Advanced Preparation: You will need to make enough copies of Ice Cream Toppings for your whole class. You will need one copy for each team of two. You will also need graph paper.
"Boys and Girls, Ben and Jerry need our help!" I then read them the problem (Ice Cream Toppings). "You will be working in teams of two to figure out which topping is our class' favorite topping. You will have to figure out a way to collect and organize your data, then answer the questions on the 2nd page. Finally, you will have to graph your data by making a bar graph."
I then break the class into teams.
"I will read the problem one more time. What are you trying to find out? You need to make sure that you answer that question for Ben and Jerry."
Students will now start working on the task. As students work, I will circulate amongst the groups. This unit is intended to review the data and analysis concepts that I taught earlier in the year. We are nearing the end of first grade, so most students will be able to successfully collect and organize the data. However, I will help groups that run into trouble or need a little reteaching as they work.
I have included a video (Organizing the Data) of a student explaining how they are organizing their data. This is a typical approach of creating a table and then placing each students' name in the column of their response.
I have also included an example of how another team collected and organized their data (Example of Data Collecting), their responses to the questions (Completed Data Questions), and their completed graph (Completed Graph).
In this case the students are meeting the CCSS expectation of organizing, representing, and interpreting data with three categories; asking and answering questions about the total number of data points, how many in each category, and how many more or less are in one category than in another (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.MD.C.4).
I will gather the students back to the carpet area for a closing discussion. I will then have different teams explain how they collected the data. I will choose teams that each used different approaches. In this case it will most likely be a table with tally marks for each choice or a table with a student's name for each choice. The point will be for them to see different ways of collecting and organizing data but that they each had the same results.
In this case, the students are representing their thinking with mathematics by using tables and graphs. This sharing of approaches will allow students to see a variety of ways of collecting and displaying information (CCSS.MATH.PRACTICE.MP4).
I will ask the students to meet me on the carpet and hand out their sheet for today's Mad Minute exercise. This routine was introduced in a previous lesson. Please check out the link to get a full overview of this routine.
I want to really focus on fact fluency and build upon the students ability to solve within ten fluently (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.C.6). I am going to use the Mad Minute Routine. This is a very "old school" routine, but I truly feel students need practice in performing task for fluency in a timed fashion. Students need to obtain fact fluency in order to have success with multiplicative reasoning. Students who don't gain this addition fact fluency by the end of 2nd grade tend to struggle with the multiplicative reasoning in third. Having this fluency also allows them to work on more complex tasks because the have the fact recall to focus on the higher level concepts.