Tag Archives: math warm ups

Math Warm-Ups February 11-14, 2013

Another 4-day week for us, but only a 3-day warm-up week because of some very messy cubbies that needed to be attended to on Tuesday morning.  Happy calculating!

Monday

IMG157Can you catch the mistake I made in this warm-up question?  I didn’t catch it until we started discussing how to do it and figured out that you can’t round a decimal to the hundredths place if it’s already a hundredth!  So we changed it to tenths.  Oops.  HATE it when that happens, but LOVE that it continues to teach my kiddos I’m not perfect.  Teachers don’t know everything and they do make mistakes.  And we know how to solve problems like that when they happen.  So I guess in some ways this was a double-whammy warm-up: two lessons in one!  Only wish I’d planned it that way….:)

Tuesday

Oh, yeah, we were cubby cleaning.  There was too much mess to take a picture, so nothing to share here.

Wednesday

IMG158We had been working on place value and rounding with decimals for about a week and were ready to move on to adding and subtracting, which I was figuring would be pretty straightforward, and so relatively easy.  The way this one was worded, though, caught a couple of kiddos because they wouldn’t remember what “sum” and “difference” meant–definitions we reviewed as we went over the problems.

That second problem sparked another one, too, which was a goodie:

IMG159What do you do when you have a whole number and you subtract a decimal?  There isn’t a decimal to line up.  Or is there??

Thursday

IMG160There’s a joke in this warm-up (that’s probably only funny to me and my class).  See, we were noticing on Wednesday that many of the word problems we have in our math book involve running (Sally ran .89 of a mile on Monday, 2.3 miles on Tuesday and .5 miles on Wednesday, etc.).  In our groups we’d been talking about how guilty those references made me feel since I’ve been REALLY lazy about my running the last few months.  So Thursday I made the problem all about my running.  But since I can’t lie about what’s really happening, I made sure to say that we should pretend that I ran all those miles last week.

But aside from making us all laugh at my funny joke, there was another reason I wrote the problem the way I did.  We are going to be moving into multiplication of decimals next week and I wanted to see what they could do with that.  The problem could easily be answered without multiplying, too, for those that weren’t ready yet–and some just used repeated addition to get the answer–but some did try multiplication as a strategy.  Many of those figured out just what to do with the decimal point, and did so in a logical way–which I loved!  Rather than spouting off the rule about having the same number of decimal places in the answer as in the problem, they used what they know about the problem.  They got to the number 2282, and when thinking about what the final answer should be, thought “Well it can’t be 2.282 because that’s not even as far as she ran in one day.  It can’t be 228.2 because number is WAY too big.  22.82 makes sense because 3 miles times 7 days is 21 miles and the answer has to be a little bigger than that.”  THAT is the kind of thinking I look for and was so excited to see as I threw them this new concept.  It makes me excited to hear and see more as we dig in deeper this upcoming week!

Math Warm-Ups February 4-8, 2013

We had a pretty much normal week with warm-ups, so I have five to share!  This week we started working on decimals, and our warm-ups were related.

Monday

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Tuesday

IMG134There are two notes to make about this warm-up: 1) that should say “expanded form” rather than “extended form”, and 2) I realized after I’d written it that they weren’t ready to talk about that yet.  Sometimes I’ll do a warm-up about a brand new concept, especially if we’re going to talk about it that day in rotations, but that just didn’t make sense for this one.  I was out with a sick baby, and we weren’t going to talk about it for another couple of days, so we skipped that part until later.

 

Wednesday

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Thursday

IMG136So this was the day when we came back to expanded form.  I was glad that we waited, because I could tell from their responses that they didn’t have a clear idea about what it meant.  Many wrote the number in words–which is word form instead of expanded form.  Once I showed them what it was, many remembered, and so after the whole number we tried it with a decimal (the part at the bottom).  The whole idea of expanded from with decimals is new (both to my students and to me!) and was added in because of changes we’re making to align closer with Common Core standards.  Once you start talking about how it works, though, it’s really the same idea as with a whole number.  Most picked up on it pretty quickly.

 

Friday

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Math Warm-Ups January 28-February 1, 2013

Another busy week in Rm. 202!  This week we only had three warm-ups because of our schedule.  Enjoy solving them!

Monday

IMG127This warm-up was a nod to the next part of our geometry unit–coordinate grids.  We’re also going to continue to practice “old” skills like adding fractions to keep them fresh–and because many kiddos still didn’t quite get it during our fraction unit.

 

Tuesday

IMG128One thing that I want to make sure I always highlight for my kiddos is the fact that they know many things that help make math easier in their heads than on paper.  I want them to be flexible thinkers, and know how to do things in more than one way.  This one was a way to get them thinking about using  known (in this case a multiple of 10) to help them figure out a problem.  Below it is the number string that we worked through after the initial conversation.

 

Wednesday

IMG129Can you tell we ran out of chart paper this day?  Nothing like using every last bit of it!  While this question could have been seen as “easy” to some, I was hoping that since we’d done these before, kiddos could dig deeper and share a problem that was harder than just this plus this equals 125.  I LOVED it when Luke through out a problem with exponents!  We had a great conversation about how they work, and the best part is that we’re going to do more with them during our upcoming decimal unit–as we discuss expanded form.  It’s so great when kid provides a natural connection without even knowing it!  You can’t plan that kind of stuff.  Beautiful. 🙂

 

Math Warm-Ups January 22-25, 2013

This was a short week because of the MLK holiday on Monday, so we only had four warm-ups this time around.  Most were related to our current geometry unit, except for the last one from yesterday.  I’ll explain that one at the end.

Tuesday

IMG122Besides just knowing polygons and their names, a major focus of this unit is being able to figure out unknown angles using information that is already known.  That septagon that I made is actually created from 3 separate triangle pieces (that we know and have figured out the angles of), so then here I was asking them to use that known information to determine the measure of this new angle.  Many of them also used the idea of a “right angle + some more”, and the fact that it was an obtuse angle in their calculations.  We also focused on the way this question was worded: many went right to telling me WHAT the angle was rather than HOW they figured it out, which is what I was actually asking.  This is an important test-taking strategy that we were able to highlight, as well.

Wednesday

                                     IMG123     IMG124

This question was an extension of what we had just been talking about the day before.  Our focus was on all the different names that one polygon could have, as well as the continued use of known angles to determine unknown ones.  The “G” refers to the way that rhombus is labeled in the set of Power Polygons we use as manipulatives.

Thursday

IMG125This warm-up was a review of old knowledge, but then we used it to connect to our new concepts from this unit.  I reminded them (since of course this seemed like something they did AGES ago!) that area is just like all the work they did with arrays during our study of multiplication.  We also were reminded of how we could use our knowledge of order of operations to correctly write the equation of how we figured out the perimeter.  The lesson following this asked them to be able to create new rectangles based on this one, but with different area/same perimeter  or different perimeter/same area.

Friday

IMG126Hopefully you’ll notice the difference in this one.  This week we were looking at winter benchmarking data noticing that our 5th graders seemed to have a hard time showing that they are solid in computation skills.  It’s clear that we need to do more practice with computation even when it’s not the unit we’re in, as well as more practice with timed situations (the benchmark we use asks them to complete a certain number of problems in 8 minutes).  Other than the benchmark and standardized testing, they aren’t asked to do this.  Simply having more opportunities like that could be helpful.

Math Warm-Ups January 14-18, 2013

This week’s warm-ups are geometry related, as we are at the beginning of a 2D geometry unit now.  My hope was that they were review, since they’ve had similar units for many years.  And for the most part, they were.  Oh, and you’ll notice there are only 3 this week; the morning schedules were a little rushed on Tuesday and Friday, so we skipped them those days.

Monday

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And speaking of having done it before, my kindergartener is actually talking about these very things right now, too!  When I shared this question with him, he was able to tell me which were polygons and which were not!  The definition was simpler in kindergarten, but the idea was the same.  Cool!

Wednesday

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This one was pretty easy, but was a conversation starter for that day.  It helped us take the next step to putting quadrilaterals into categories.

Thursday

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When we first talked about this one, we were unclear about the definition for a parallelogram.  We spent our group time on Thursday clarifying this.

What do you know about geometry?  What questions would you ask for a geometry math warm-up?  Share some with us in the comments!

 

ActivActivity–January 16-17, 2013

Remember when we were in the middle of our fraction unit and we were dividing?  Think about the problem about bows: Avery had 6 yards of ribbon.  He’s making bows for packages, and each bow uses 1/3 of a yard of ribbon.  How many bows can he make?  Then think about how we all said 1/18 for the answer?  I’ll remind you of how we solved it:

Screen Shot 2013-01-16 at 6.21.20 AM

Today your job is to create a fraction problem with division.  I’m not going to tell you what the answer has to be–I want you to figure out that part, too!  You can divide a whole number by a fraction (like this one), or you can divide a fraction by a whole number if you remember how to do that.  Remember to make sure your story makes sense, that you have an answer that is LOGICAL, and that you sign your names so we know who’s amazing thinking it is! Good luck, friends!

Math Warm-Ups January 7-11, 2013

Happy New Year!  I don’t know about you, but I was able to enjoy 16 days off between 2nd quarter and now and it was FABULOUS!  What a great gift to be able to spend two whole weeks with my family!  And now I am reenergized and ready to get back into a school groove. 🙂

So you know, if you’ve been here before, that math warm-ups are part of that groove.  This week I decided to revisit some older concepts (and by old I just mean beginning of the year–to a 5th grader that’s like an eternity ago!) just to remind them that they still need to know how to do this stuff!  Thankfully, most had not forgotten.

Monday

IMG103Ok, so I guess I lied about them all being oldies-but-goodies.  This one was actually based on a problem from an end-of-unit assessment that pretty much everyone got wrong!  I really needed to reiterate the fact that it’s really important to think LOGICALLY when you’re doing math.  The answer to that problem that most people said–1/18–doesn’t make ANY sense!  How the heck do I make 1/18 of a bow?!

Tuesday

IMG104Again, I wanted to make sure they had a solid understanding of the difference and the connection between multiplying and dividing fractions.

Wednesday

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Thursday

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Friday

IMG110This one ended up being a lot easier than I first anticipated.  I was really close to making it have the “rules” of being a fraction problem, but decided to give them a try with a less complicated one until they tackled a more difficult one.  There were promises for more of these next week where they can stretch their creative math muscles!  Can’t wait to see what they do. 🙂

Math Warm-Ups Nov. 26-30, 2012

This week we had five whole days of school!  And even better, we had five math warm-ups!  Check ’em out!

Monday

IMG593

 

 

Tuesday

IMG594

This warm-up question illustrates just how authentic and real-life I try to make these.  This one really came from a conversation I had with a group as they were working on the problem I gave during work time on Monday.  It was just where I wanted us to go, and so presenting it as a warm-up made sense.  And when it can be suggested as a kid’s idea instead of mine–which it really was, anyway–that’s even better.

 

Wednesday

IMG590

As they did these warm-ups, the focus was on finding common denominators to help them add.  Rather than finding the LCM, however, I want them to connect these to work we’ve already done with fraction-percent equivalents; they know they can double or halve certain fractions to make other ones.  Mostly we’ve worked with thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, eighths, and tenths, but I threw that 25 and 50 one in there to see if they could transfer the thinking to a similar problem.  They could. 🙂

 

Thursday

IMG591

This one reminded (or introduced to some) us of important vocabulary of improper fractions and mixed numbers.  As we added these, they focused on changing the mixed number to an improper fraction, adding them, and then reducing it to simplest terms.  Notice how the last one has the fraction circled?  It was on this problem that someone figured out that we could add the whole numbers and then just add the fractions and put them back together.  Smart, huh?  Again–this was so much more meaningful that they discovered it on their own, than if I just told them that they could do that as a shortcut.

 

Friday

IMG592

These problems encouraged my friends to focus on the strategy we had discovered at the end of the warm-up the day before, and also threw in some vocab we already knew (sums).  By the end of this conversation, there some kids who were smiling, which was nice considering all the frowns I’d seen early on in the week.  🙂

On a side note…sorry for the mess of the charts this week.  I ran out of chart paper and had to use the backs, too!  It’s resourceful, right?  Or just messy…not sure which. 🙂

 

 

Math Warm-Ups Nov. 12-16, 2012

With last week being Thanksgiving, I wasn’t able to get the warm-ups posted for you.  So here they are, but a couple of extra pics of what we’ve been doing with fractions in math lately.  That makes up for it, right? 🙂

 

Tuesday

 

Wednesday

 

Thursday

 

Also this week, though not as Warm-Ups were these charts:

 

The whole focus of this fraction unit we’re in the middle of is that kiddos use equivalents–often fraction/percent equivalents–to solve problems and figure out the fractional part of a group.  It’s a pretty cool way of thinking, and makes so much more sense to many kids than the way I know I learned about fractions.  We’ve also been working on using grids to “see” how much the part is, so that we can find an equivalent or add another part to it.  We might take a 4 x 6 grid, then and break it into eighths, thirds or sixths by just drawing lines like this:

 

It’s pretty magical, actually, how thinking this way has made a once very negative topic make so much more sense to so many kiddos!  Stay turned for more about how we’re tackling fractions in a fun, “real” and authentic way!

Math Warm-ups Nov. 5-9, 2012

This was a slim week for math warm-ups.  We didn’t have school on Tuesday because of Election Day, and then I guess since we were in between units, there were really any good questions that came to mind.  That being said, I feel like I should apologize for these; they may not be very helpful to those of you who were here to get ideas.  Next will be better.  I promise. 🙂

 

I think this one was from Monday.  It was related to an assessment that my friends had finished the week before.  I was out of the classroom for a meeting when they did it, so partly this question was to get a better feel for how they perceived their performance on it.  I’m glad I asked, because their words told me more than the note from the sub about how it had gone.  They felt better than it had at first seemed they did.

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I don’t think we had another warm-up until Friday, and this was it.  At the beginning of a unit, I usually ask this same type of tell-me-what-you-already-know question. 🙂

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Thanks for reading!