Five for Friday - January 29

It's Friday - So I'm linking up again with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. Be sure to link up here!  I'm super excited for the weekend as this week went a little slow.  A little too slow for my liking.  See what we've been up to for the past week below...


This game is called Double Compare Multiplication. There are many different versions of Double Compare and for all you need a deck of number cards. We used our Investigation number cards. Students divide out all of the cards so they have an even amount.  Then, both students flip over two cards.  They multiply the two cards (their factors) together and whoever has the largest number (product) wins.  Just a quick way to do some multiplication review.

Oh, how I love this book! We do three chapter book whole class book studies throughout the year in addition to using the Journey's series. I love the book studies because it give us a break from the program routine.  I also love this one because it's hilarious.  The kids love it and they are super engaged because they can't wait to see what all happens to John. I highly recommend this book for either a chapter book study or a class read aloud - 2nd or 3rd grade.  It's too funny!

We still have a few days to go until February, but my awesome group of room moms were already ready to decorate for February. Look how cute this door display turned out! I'm super grateful that we have very active parent participation at my school!

This is a sneak peek of one of my newest soon-to-be TPT projects that is not in my store yet. We've been working hard on multiplication and have also been working on finding the missing factor.  This week, kids had a chance to work on Factors Around the Room. A product and separate blog post about factors is coming soon!





I haven't bored people with house pictures in awhile so I thought I'd add a few in here lol.  Andy and I are building our first house! It's so crazy to see how much progress they make on it in just a few days time.  Here the framing is pretty much complete!  Can't wait to move in!

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

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Multiplication Story Problems

One of my favorite things to teach is math. And, I love teaching it this time of year because this is when we start multiplication in 2nd grade. The kids are always so excited and eager to learn how to multiply. There's just something special about multiplication.

I love to start new math content with story problems when possible and love to use them throughout the units. Story problems are also a part of our standards, but they're also a great way to provide context and help improve understanding with math. 

These examples below are after a few days of multiplication. I love seeing the variety of strategies used and love that the kids are using strategies that work for them. 


This student represented the multiplication problem with an array and used the array to help him solve the problem. 

This student drew out the groups to help her solve. I also love how she clearly labeled the trays to keep things organized. 

This student used the combination of an array and skip counting. 

And the last example used repeated addition. Love how he summed it up at the end after showing his work.

Those are just a few examples. When students are done independently solving, I pick a few to share their work with the class under the document camera. This gives them a chance to explain their thinking and also learn from each other. Story problems are done at least once a week in my classroom so that whole word problem fear is nonexistent. My kids actually enjoy doing them!

Do you use story problems to teach math?

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Start Your Year Sale - January 20-21

I'm so excited for TPT's Start Your Year Sale that will be going on Wednesday, January 20 through Thursday, January 21st. My whole store - Jordan Johnson -  is 20% off! With the TPT code START16 you can get 28% off!  Happy Shopping!


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Morning Meeting Remix

I love using Morning Meeting in my classroom to start our day and have done a little remix to how I lay it out each week. Check out my Morning Meeting series for how to set it up here...

I still follow all four parts of Morning Meeting - Greeting, Share, Activity, and Morning Message. The part I've changed or mixed up is the focus area for those four parts. For the first half of the school year, Morning Meeting was academic, but a bit all over. Some weeks I covered a lot of math topics during the message and activity and some weeks a lot of reading or writing.  I decided to set a routine in place to help make sure I cover all of the areas each week. I'm also now throwing in more content to try to maximize my time - since there is never enough time in the day.  

Here's my new schedule...

Monday - Math Monday
The activity and message fit around math topics. It could be review, it could be building background for new content. Either way - it's all math!

Tuesday - Fluency and Phonics Fun
I've had a hard time fitting in fluency whole group, so now it is a part of activity on Tuesdays. We also discuss our phonics focus during the morning message and greeting.

Wednesday - More Math...
This day has been about fact fluency during the activity and review during the message.

Thursday - Vocabulary
Vocabulary is another area that I touch on, but haven't given enough time.  Now that vocabulary is our focus on Thursdays, I tailor our greeting, activity, and message to it. For example, when students greet each other they have to also use one of their weekly vocab words in a sentence. I've also found a ton of fun vocabulary games for them to play during the activity.

Friday - Fix It Friday
Another skill we always need to review is grammar and editing. On Friday, our morning message sentence always needs to be fixed. This gives us a chance to review editing skills and continue to add in new grammar skills as we go. 



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Five for Friday - January 15

I'm linking up again with Doodle Bugs Five for Friday. Link up here!  So excited for the long weekend ahead! Check out what we've been up to below...


Contractions were our spelling/phonics focus this week. It's so funny to me that the kids were really good about coming up with the word that made the contraction, but had difficulty reading the word as a contraction. Something about that apostrophe throws them! We made this chart together and practiced reading all of the words a lot! It's starting to stick!

Our comprehension skill this week was comparing and contrasting characters. We read the story Yonder Mountain in our Journey's text and then created a double bubble (thinking maps), well more of a triple bubble map to find the similarities and differences. Later in the week, we read Strega Nona and the kids compared Big Anthony to Strega Nona.  They loved it!


Multiplication! Another exciting thing we've been working on in second grade. Last week we started this unit and have been focusing on building the conceptual understanding (with arrays, repeated addition, pictures) instead of just memorizing the facts.  The kids have done AMAZING! This week I even started giving them problems that were one digit multiplied by two digit like above and they rocked it! They really understand the concept of equal groups and have no fear when trying bigger problems. I am so proud of them and love seeing them try various strategies.

We worked on word choice again this week in Writing Workshop. Last week, we added on to sentences together. This week I gave kids the chance to work on their own sentences. I put up the basic sentence and then they had to make it more descriptive, specific, and interesting.  They had fun being quite creative!
This is a beautiful portrait of me from the back of a spelling test last week. My favorite part is that she captured my sunglasses on my head, which is where they always are!


Happy Friday! Have a wonderful 3 day weekend!



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Five for Friday - January 8

Well...we've survived the first week back!  It was a short one since we had training on Monday, but still felt long after the 2 week break. I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday - Link up here!


This week in Writing Workshop we started working on word choice. I started by showing the kids the first sentence "The dog ate." We talked about how it was a sentence, but it wasn't very interesting. Then, the kids and I worked together to come up with a few different ways to make it more exciting.  I was also so excited to see some kids taking what we had talked about and trying it in their own writing like my student example above. I love how she talked about "freshly bloomed, red rose petals," and the "big really poofy flower girl dress."  


We started multiplication this week! Boy were they excited! Something about multiplication is always a big deal in second grade. On Tuesday, we talked about multiplication as equal groups and showed how to model that. Students then played the game - Circles and Stars and/or Birds(eggs) in the. Students roll the dice once and that number is the number of groups they have (circles). Then, they roll again and that is the number in each group. Then, they count to find the total. 


On Wednesday we continued on in multiplication and began learning about arrays. I wanted to make it a little more interesting and was inspired by our CGI training on Monday, so I had them make arrays with Skittles. Immediately it was super exciting and the best activity ever they kept telling me.  Something about candy...




I'll try to not to show house pictures every time, but I'm super excited because framing has begun on the house Andy and I are building! Exciting to see it all go up! Come on April so we can move in!



This is a picture from New Year's Eve. Andy and I went to the Spazmatic's show - they're an 80's cover band. Quite a fun night and quite an entertaining crowd.

Hope everyone had a great first week back!


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