Using Halloween Dollar Store Finds in Math

Looking for some fun ways to use all those dollar store Halloween props you've accumulated in your Math and Literacy blocks? Here's a few ways you can use your cheap finds at school. 

Halloween Pencil Toppers

I picked up these cute pencil toppers as a Halloween treat for my class but soon got other ideas for them!

When working on direction in Math and HASS, we used the toppers as our 'person' to move along the grid. When learning 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 turns, I always find there are a few students who will try and move spaces when turning, instead of staying in the grid space they are in. Using the pencil toppers help because we practice turning the topper in the space and we can see the new direction it is facing before following the next direction. For younger kids, they can use the toppers to learn left and right when giving and following directions. Grab this math activity from my store here. 

You can use the same pencil toppers as pawns for board games to add a little extra fun! You can grab this short and long /oo/ activity pack and board game from my store here. 

Halloween Buckets I use candy buckets to hold math centers. I also bought mini-candy buckets and use them for sorting activities. Here is one I made for ICP students working on addition and subtraction facts. I wrote facts on craft sticks and the wrote the sums/differences on the back of the heads and pumpkins. The students sort the sticks into the mini tubs. This same idea could be used for parts of speech, multiplication and division facts etc. You can grab this free recording sheet here if you'd like to make up this activity for yourself. 

Spooky Fingers

When I taught in Grades 1-2, I used these spooky fingers to track our reading!

I might bring them out again this year with my Grade 4's just for a bit of fun! Also, Nick Bland was hands down our favorite author in Grade 1! The orange tub was bought from Woolworths (I think) in a pack of 3. 

So there you go, some quick and easy ways to bring some Halloween fun into your classroom! Let me know in the comments your ideas!

Summer Centers

I've just finished my first 'big' pack since October/November last year! Since then, I've been buying up a storm to keep my literacy and math centers going smoothly. This pack has taken me over 6 weeks to complete. I've just been making new centers when I haven't been able to find what I need in packs I've bought or downloaded. I need a lot too, because I differentiate my literacy centers. Depending on my kids needs (and how busy I am...) I have 2-3 levels of activities for Word Work, Spelling, Sight Words, Sentences and up to 5 different activities (for 5 different groups) for Write About Reading, which is my reading response center (although sometimes this is just 1 response activity that all groups complete based on their guided reading text). In the past I've done the Daily 5, but I thought my kids this year in Grade 1 needed more work on the basics. I'll do a post at some point to explain what the kids do in each one.

So this pack has 7 literacy and 7 math centers that I needed for some of the kids in my class. I apologise for my awful photos, I've been meaning to get a new camera for ages now, mine must be at least 8-9 years old now and it doesn't take great photos.

This is a sight word scramble activity, so a sight word literacy center. This was for my higher groups (they could choose whether or not to use the word guide). They chose two words to put in a sentence on the bottom (this sheet is already filled in and marked by my wonderful student teacher). My lower groups had a sight word scramble where the sight words were backed on a picture and cut up and they had to put them back together and so is self-correcting because they have the picture to help them. They needed that extra scaffold and the simpler sight words.

I had this Floating Through Sounds activity out last week for my two lower groups for a spelling center. They had to stretch out the sounds and write a letter/s in each box. It included some digraphs that needed to be placed in one box (e.g. ck, ph). It was a bit too hard for my lowest group :(
 

This Sundae Sound Sort has been another activity for my lowest group where they sort by medial vowel sound and write the word on the recording sheet my stretching them out. This one is for CVC words.

This activity I made for my middle groups as they need a little reinforcement with digraphs. They take the pegs (that have a sh, ch or th splash hot glued on them) and clip it on the card where they hear the sound (beginning, middle or end of the word).

All of the centers in this pack have an I Can chart to help students be independent at their centers. The pack comes in a zip file because it contains a U.S. spelling pack and a British spelling pack. Just delete the one you don't need. You can see I've printed the British spelling pack that has 'color' spelled 'colour'. Because most of my readers are American, I've used the American spelling of 'center' all though this post as well, even though we spell it 'centre' here in Australia! I've had some readers point out that I'm always spelling it wrong (centre) so I just thought I'd mention that we spell it differently here!
I've put this pack on TpT for 30% off for two days since I didn't have it ready for the big sale. I've only shown the preview of 8 of the 14 centers below since this post is so long. Check out the preview on TpT if you'd like for the rest.

 

 

If you've read down this far, thank you! Leave a comment below with your email address and I'll give it away to someone tonight.  

My son chose number 9! Congratulations Karyn! I'll email you now!

Freebie - Number Sequence Elves

I'm gearing up for the last 15, YES 15, days left of the school year! Where has the year gone?? I don't know about you, but the first half really dragged on for me but the second half has just shot by!

I want to keep my kidlets working hard though... I find this keeps their behaviour under check. So I'm making up some math activities to review some things we've learned this year. We actually did my Gingerbread Man Activities last week, but I didn't really take any photos because while they were quietly (and they sure were!) working, I was pulling kids to do some final running records (arrghh, the bane of my existence!). 

Anyway, since I love you all I'll give you a new math centre each day this week. 

 TpT and TN

And don't forget the sales going on at Teachers Notebook and TpT, both my stores are 20% off at the moment. Teachers Notebook will automatically deduct another 10% from your order total - that sale is on NOW! The TpT sale starts Monday (U.S. time) and you can use the code CMT12 at checkout to also get an additional 10% off the reduce price of all items.

I sure do love comments so please leave one if you're feeling the love!

(and yes, for those who've asked me before, I did spell 'behavior' with a /u/ and 'center' with an /re/ but that's how we spell it here in Australia!).

Halloween Math Centers for 2nd Grade PLUS Freebie

This week was a short week for us, Monday being a Student Free Day. We were lucky to have the afternoon to ourselves for planning and preparation which was great!

Because we lost a day and reports are coming up, instead of normal math centers, I decided to put out review activities so I could pull students for individual assessments. I chose 9 activities so we'll do 1 each day after our whole class lesson and activity this week and next week. I also put the kids in mixed ability groups of 2-3 students. Even though the content was review, the activities were new and from my Halloween and Fall math packs. 

I have to say the kids had a ball! I kept them working for about 25 mins and each time we stopped they asked if they could go onto the next activity! 

 

We changed up one of the activities from my Halloween Math Pack for 2nd-3rd grade. Instead of printing out the trick-or-treating bags and candy for my Candy Sharing center, my kids used jack-o-lantern buckets and fake spiders to act out the division sharing problems.

You can grab the packs these activities are from at my TpT store. 

Another game we've been playing to master addition math facts the last two weeks is Witchy Brew. You can download it for FREE here in google drive. 

I'm also LOVIN my tubs of counters and a double dice. I have enough for every student in the class. Each holds 20 counters, a double dice and a paper clip to act as a spinner. We use them just about every day. For this game, they roll the double dice (or 2 dice), add them together and move the number of spaces. My students who are already pretty good with their facts use 1-10 dice instead. 

Do you have a favorite Fall or Halloween themed activity? 

Free 2D Shapes Game

One thing I love to do during our two week breaks is to try and get ahead for the following term by creating a few resources. I like to think that Future Kylie will be happy that I've reduced my workload during the term!

Here is a game I made to review 2D shapes. You can download it for free on TpT. 

Halloween Math Centers for 2nd-3rd Grade

I saw this on Pinterest today and just had to share:

 Source

Hehe, this is so me when I'm supposed to be working and get distracted on Pinterest or Instagram!

Even with the distractions, I've managed to finish a Halloween math pack filled with lots of hands on activities for my kids to complete after the holidays. 

 

It comes with 13 math activities for multiplication, division, graphing, area, time, transformations, directions, skip counting, arrays and measuring. You can find it in my TpT Store. 

I take it back...

In my last post, I was hoping to get *just* sick enough to justify having a day off because I was so exhausted. I wish I hadn't written that! By midday the VERY NEXT DAY (Monday), I could barely talk. I had to whisper Tuesday because my voice was gone and I started to get a cough. Wednesday and Thursday I had to have off because I couldn't talk or stop coughing. Never in all my years of working (even before I became a teacher) have I ever had to have more than one day off. But they weren't the lovely, relaxing days off I envisaged them to be. Nope. Basically it was wasted time. I didn't get any marking, planning or creating done. I sat at the computer for a long time though, mostly just staring at it, wishing I could feel motivated to do something... anything.

Friday was tough. I had a coughing fit of two (or three...) when I couldn't stop coughing for a few minutes. My poor kiddies were so concerned. I had a lovely reception though when they saw me come out the door in the morning! Even the parents noticed! It's Saturday evening and my voice still isn't perfect. It starts to get croakier if I start talking. I had TWO naps today. 

At least now I know why I was feeling so exhausted last weekend - I was coming down with something! Hopefully those naps will rejuvenate me and I'll be 100% tomorrow. 

I did get this pack finished today. You can click on the pics to see it at TpT. It's 20% off, as always, for the first few days.

 It has 5 math centres/centers:
1. 1 page of word problems with addition, subtraction and multiplication scenaries (10 problems).

2. Autumn Number Order (3-digit numbers). Comes with 6 sets of 6 cards to place in order and a choice of 2 recording sheets (record in ascending or descending order).

3. Greater Than/Less Than Leaves - 2 sets of cards (2-digit and 3-digit numbers) and recording sheet.

4. True or False Equations - Sort the addition facts onto the True and False mats and record. Some facts require students to mentally add multiples of ten and then the ones (e.g. 22+17, 32+15).

5. Apple Place Value - Sort the apple cards onto the Hundreds, Tens or Ones mat according to the underlined number. Students record the value of the underlined number on the recording sheet.


Have you ever wished for something and had it come back and bite you on the bum? I'd love to hear your 'be careful what you wish for' story! Even if you haven't got one, leave a comment below and I'll give this pack to a person or two sometime tomorrow.

Editable Literacy Center Poster Pack

I've just finished updating an old pay item. The old file had posters, rotation cards and I-Can charts for the Daily 5. However because of copyright, sellers can't sell items that are Daily 5 specific, even though teachers have always done independent reading (Read to Self), word work (Work on Words) etc. I was just going to convert the file to a freebie, but didn't really think that was fair to all the people who bought it. So, instead I've updated the file to make it editable and not Daily 5 specific. 

It comes with 12 posters, each with a different image, plus a page of editable rotation cards for each. Some centers you can do with the images include: independent reading, big book center, poetry/readers theatre, computer station, reading with teacher/helper, buddy reading, puzzles/games, pocket chart center, writing/sentences/reading responses, overhead center, listening post and word work.

 

I've also included portrait and landscape I-Can Charts, which are also editable. You can use these to type up expectations or the activities that students are required to do each week. Alternatively, you can print them blank, and write in a dry erase marker what the requirements for an activity is each week (if you change them out each week/fortnight). You could just pop the chart into the tub and the expectations are right there!

So, the file is no longer Daily 5 specific, although you can definitely use this product if you use the Daily 5. If you have purchased this file before, you are able to download the updated version for free. If you want to keep the old file, don't save this one over it!

Best of all, because it's an editable PowerPoint, you can call the centers/centres anything you like and use the font and font size you prefer (handy if you have a state font you like to use). If you use the Daily 5, you can still use this pack, but just the pages you need.

It's available on TpT and Teachers Notebook.It's 20% off for the next few days.

The CAFE Headers that used to be in this pack can no longer be included in a pay item, so I've got them listed at TpT and Teachers Notebook for free. 

I've also added 3 more cards to the CAFE Reading Strategies Cards. You can download the updated file at TpT and Teachers Notebook.

Also, I'd appreciate it if you voted for me over at Circle of Mom's for their Top 25 Teacher Moms . You don't need to register or anything, just click on the Vote button. 

I'm off to go watch some more Olympics (I'm cutting and laminating my Olympics activity pack while watching it!). I'm thinking my laminator is going to overheat and explode with how much I've been laminating lately! My Olympics Math and Literacy pack is 20% off at the moment!

Olympics Math and Literacy Activities

I didn't think I'd end up making a new pack these holidays, but I had some ideas for things I wanted to do next term and it kinda snowballed into 15 activities and over 100 pages!

I know most of the U.S. won't be in school for the Olympics, but we here Down Under are and I'm sure the kiddos are going to be SUPER excited. This will probably be the first Olympics that they can remember, since they would have only been 3 or 4 during Beijing. So... I made my pack Olympic themed. 

During our first week back in Term 3, my poor little things are going to be sitting an old Year 3 national NAPLAN test in language arts, reading and math. So a REAL test that is similar to what they would be expected to do in almost 12 months time. Why? The D word - Data. We will look over the tests (sat under NAPLAN conditions) and work out what we need to work on. Some of my little things won't even be able to read the first passage in the Reading test, let alone have been introduced to some of the content in the math test...

Anyway, it got me thinking of some things I could be doing to help prepare them for next year which is how this pack got started. So I made up some task card activities similar to NAPLAN questions: 

•  spell the underlined word correctly

• identify the mispelt word and spell it correctly. I've tried to include commonly mispelt words, past tense verbs and homophones.

  

•  punctuate the sentences (capitals for sentence beginnings and proper nouns, a range of ending puncutation and commas have been left out).

• which sentence is puntuated correctly (multiple choice slides for a whole class lesson. Students use fingerprint cards to show their response free from Angela Bunyi).

I also had a looksy (sp?) at what we need to cover this term and what I know my kids need and made up a couple of little things that will help like

•  part-part-whole models and writing number stories
•  calendar work
•  number sense - more and less 

  

And some revision activities for my Essential Revision Guided Math tub:

• meaurement
• data
• chance

           

So that's basically what's included, plus a few other things thrown in for good measure. You can read about the specifics of each activity in the description at  TpT here, TN here and for Aussie teachers, you can check it out at Teachers Marketplace. As always, it's 20% off for the first few days.