Friday, April 1, 2011

A crazy kind of day. . .

Today we had a "silly party!"  All of the first graders at my school have been working hard to master their addition facts to 18 with at least 80% accuracy.  We've been taking timed math tests since October.  Today we celebrated this accomplishment with a few special activities. Students wore silly hats, socks, and clothes.  We also read a couple of "silly" books.  



Here is one of the literature connections we used after we read "Crazy Hair Day."   



To end the day, we had a "silly" dance contest.  The highlight of the day was passing out silly bands to the students.  We went out for an extra recess, and the kids traded their hearts out!  Silly bands were such a phenomenon at the beginning of the year that I had to ban them for a while.  This was a really fun yet inexpensive way to reward the students for all of their hard work.

5 comments:

  1. What kind of timed tests do you use? I am looking for something to use next year. Right now, I'm only doing it on Fridays. Can you post them?

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  2. I would like to ditto the above post? I was wondering the very same things.

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  3. I was just going to post what the two above me posted. We do timed tests, too, but I don't like the ones we use.

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  4. We used pages from a workbook with 40 problems on each page. We started in October and the challenge lasted until the end of March because we wanted to give students 6 full months to make progress. Each week we focused on specific facts (for example 1's and 2's). Little by little we added on mixed review. Last month, I actually got some timed tests (gumball math) from "Made for 1st." Next year I'm hoping to use those. We did grade the weekly tests, but the one that counted towards the celebration was the final mixed review test. It covered addition facts to 18.

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  5. You have wonderful activities for your class. They must be so motivated. Congratulations!

    I’m retired now but taught for many years. In my combined first and second grades, we also had timed tests. Perhaps your class already has a positive attitude about timed tests. However, in my combined first and second grades, much to my surprise initially, I found a way that the children loved taking timed tests. Timed tests for addition and subtraction with multiplication, and division tests for those who were ready. See my blog:

    http://peggybroadbent.com/blog/index.php?s=The+Joy+of+Timed+Tests+in+First+and+Second+Grade

    ReplyDelete

 
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