Five for Friday - January 13

Friday the 13th! We'll see how today goes!  And a full moon... And a rainy day... And it's been ridiculously windy! This will be interesting!
I'm linking up with Kacey over at Doodle Bugs Teaching to show what we've been up to this week for another Five for Friday...

Our school is celebrating our first International Week in about a week and half. Each class has a country to study and then present what they've learned to the other classes. I chose/my class chose Holland, which works out really well since my dad was born in Holland.  He was born there and immigrated to America when he was 8.  This week we got to interview him using Facetime. It was so cute. The kids were writing notes, asking questions, etc. And, my dad did a great job his first time using Facetime. I also created a kid friendly website for the kids to research on.  It is in the first picture above.

I love math stations. We finally got back into them this week and the kids are loving this particular one. They get to use the Dive Into Shapes Kit (from Scholastic Bonus Catalog) to make all kinds of cool 2D and 3D shapes.

We've continued our study of multiplication this week and learned our last two strategies (repeated addition and skip counting). To introduce skip counting (which I know the kids knew, but I wanted to make a strong connection between it and multiplication), I used the CGI strategy choral counting. The students helped me count by 4's. We went slow enough I could write, which also gave my kiddos needing more time, time to think.  

Then, I asked them to look at what we came up with and see what they noticed. Most kids noticed that it went up by 4's and down by 20's. Some kid's noticed that the pattern went 4, 8, 2, 6, 0 in the ones spot. Another student noticed that they were all even numbers. All great observations!

Next, I started writing the multiplication problems above. But, instead of just writing them I explained it like 1 group of 4 is 4, 2 groups of 4 is 8, etc and the kids joined in and helped me out. Then, one of my kiddos made the connection that skip counting is just like repeated addition, which is just like multiplication!!! HOORAY! Fireworks should've gone off...just kidding. But it was one of those teaching moments that you remember and I feel most have a strong understanding of the different strategies and concept of multiplication.

Here's a little student funny for you. Our phonics sounds last week were OR and ORE.  Students had to create words with those sound spellings.  I had a very interesting one! I'm hoping she was going for pouring???

Anyone else also in full-blown organization mode? Something about the new year and gift cards and buying new organization bins made me want to clean out our pantry. Here is the after picture. The containers and organization make my OCD heart happy!

Have a lovely 3 day weekend!