Getting Crafty!

Since I am playing catch up I am going to attempt to highlight a few of this past fall's activities in one post!  Here we go....

October, for being a long month, went by in the blink of an eye.  Here are some of the highlights!:

We were in the depths of our place value unit and did lots of hard work investigating and dissecting numbers.  We discovered all the different ways to represent numbers, compared numbers, and rounded numbers.  

Here are some of my students completing Amy Lemon's Peekin' at Place Value activity from her incredible Number Knowledge packet.  The students loved getting up and moving around to record their answers

We also worked hard on rounding.  Since it was so close to Halloween I thought a craft was definitely necessary!  I was perusing Amy Lemon's awesome blog Step into Second Grade (her site has been a fantastic help for this new-to-second-grade teacher).  I saw that she had used Cara Carroll's adorable, FREE bat template to sort addition and subtraction.  So we used it to make these cute little guys to decorate our hallways.  I had the students sort their numbers by those they should round down and those that should round up.

You can get my rounding numbers document HERE. 

I also created my first item for Teachers Pay Teachers around this time.  Rounding on the Roller coaster can be used whole group or in centers.  Students must sort between numbers you would round up and numbers you would round down.   

I used the roller coaster graphic as one of my visuals (along with a rounding 100s chart and number lines).  I would draw my roller coaster cart up to the four and point out that if the cart stopped there it would roll back to the last group of ten.  If our cart stopped on the five at the top it would round all the way to the next group of ten.  You can get this activity for FREE on my TpT site HERE!

Around that same time we also spent some time researching different types of spiders.  Again, I have the incredible Amy Lemons to thank!  My students absolutely LOVED this activity.  We paired up and researched on the computer.  They also filled out the "If I was a spider..." writing activity that week during Daily 5.  Here's the LINK to the resource.

We were studying matter at this time as well, so of course we had to make some Oobleck!  Since Halloween is such a crazy, hyped up day anyway, why not do it then!?! ;)  The kids had a blast turning their oobleck from solid to liquid and back again many times.  It was my first time making it and even though I most definitely was not my custodian's favorite person that day, it is on my list of things to do every year!

I know I said I was going to do all of fall in one post, but whew!  Just October made for a really long post!  I promise to post our awesome turkeys and Santa letters soon!  I. will. get. caught. up!!  (Fingers crossed)