Math fun

Our birthday girl putting chickens in the pen on the Smartboard

We are starting module 4 in math this week. A good part of this module will introduce us to subtraction and subtraction language. As we started out today, we spent some time acting out "take away" stories. We made a chicken coop on the floor out of chalk and then had several students act like chickens. We then had a student act like a fox and chase some of the chickens out. We did a lot of talking about what it meant when some of the chickens "flew the coop". After playing the game in a concrete way, we switched our learning to representing what we were doing with pictures. We'll be doing more picture representations and acting this week before moving to more abstract problems where it is just the numbers (6-2). Or goal is for students to truly understand subtraction language (take away, flew away, ate, rolled away, etc) before moving into using abstract language such as "minus"

We also practiced our fact fluency today with a game of Kahoot! We are definitely getting better with our count on facts ( facts where we add 1,2, or 3) 

Any help you can give your child at home to reinforce these facts would be greatly appreciated. We always say the big number first and then count on. For many, it would still be beneficial to have them use objects to count-on. 

For example, put 3 pieces of Halloween candy out of the table and then ask them how many they would have if they got 2 more. Put two more pieces to the right of the original pieces and then have your child say 3, move one more over and say 4 and then move the last one over and say 5. At this point, just working on facts to 10 would be wonderful but if your child is ready, feel free to go to 20.