Early in December, Donna, of
Math Coach's Corner,
blogged about recreating a project to build number representation using
a Christmas tree. I loved the idea, but we aren't allowed to do a lot
with Christmas due to the very diverse group of students we have. So, I
cornered one of our fabulous first grade teachers who I had been working
with and asked if she wanted to be my guinea pig. Luckily for me, she
said yes!
Our work began with having the students
brainstorming ways they knew how to represent numbers. Once they got
going, they were tough to stop! They'd see me in the hall in between our
sessions together and yell new ideas out to me. As a result, their
final anchor chart looked like this:
(The fabulous Teresa...I know the chart's a bit tough to read, but it's FULL!)
Our
second session started with adding more to the chart...the ideas they
were yelling at me down the hall...and then on to the introduction of
the project in full. Each child began by choosing a number. It had to be
between 20 and 99. After telling Teresa or I their number, they got
their page of "Snowman Items". These were pulled together from
Scrappin' Doodles, Create a Snowman. They immediately chose one of the hats and
put their number on it. They then got started on their first
representation.
In
all, the snowmen had between 5-8 different number representations on
them when they finished. We forgot to add the cool ten frames presents
the kids made and Teresa had to have the kiddos stick those on after we
took the pictures. These came straight from Donna's great project.
The
kids did a fantastic job with these! It was the perfect project right
before break, and I'm thankful to have such willing teachers who take
risks.
