Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of February 8-11, 2016

This was another of those weird weeks in the Winter where we have less than a full week of school. Oh, yeah, and we celebrated Valentine’s Day today which made for a funny schedule. AND then you add in ridiculous Missouri weather and an accident (oh, no, not mine–just one that added an hour to my commute!) and this week has already been the longest in ages. What? It’s only Thursday? Well here’s to a professional development day tomorrow, then. 🙂

So…a short week and a crazy day today means I have only three warm-ups to share. I think they’re pretty good ones, though. Made for great conversations. Enjoy! Oh, yeah, they’re all about money again.

Monday

This was the first time I’d asked a money question written in equation form. Many were confused by seeing cents written as dollars (they kept saying “Why did you put a dollar sign there?”), and so we had to clarify that during our debrief.

IMG_0548-min

Tuesday

This was a challenge to think of amounts in more than one way. They did pretty well with it, though.

IMG_0471-min

Wednesday

When we talked about this one, we had some great conversations about efficiency when counting coins, and how making piles of dollars (starting with the biggest coins) is a quick way to figure out the total. We also practiced making $.25 in multiple ways (not just a quarter). We called it “Mickey Mouse” when we found 2 dimes and a nickel, so 2 Mickeys and a 2 quarters makes a dollar, as does 2 Mickeys and a half dollar. Just so you know. 🙂

IMG_0549-min

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of November 16-20, 2015

I apologize for the fact that it’s been nearly THREE WEEKS since I last wrote on this blog. I’m not even sure what happened. Oh wait, I do. Life happened. And I was tired. It was one of those times in life when you have to do really cool things and take pictures of really cool things, but not write about it, you know? Oh well, here’s to trying to fix that. Starting now. So onward we go!

Monday

We were starting a new unit in math this past week, so the warm-ups were no longer addition and subtraction. This one is connected to some essential questions we will be chewing on throughout the unit, as well as serving as a way for me to know with what background knowledge everyone is starting.

Tuesday

Another essential question from our unit…

Wednesday

This pic is obviously NOT a math warm-up but is instead a view of where we were on this particular morning. I sometimes use our warm-up routine as a way to make plans for our day, or to highlight a goal that we will all be working on together. This was related to the work we were doing last week with remembering to focus on caring for others rather than just ourselves first.

Thursday

Back on track with measurement. 🙂

This last one isn’t a math warm-up, nor do I remember what day it’s from, but it was a great example of how math happens all the time in our room! Oh, and it used skills we had just learned in our last unit, so it was great practice. We were starting a new chapter book (Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne–a Magic Treehouse book), and were interested in knowing when the first Thanksgiving took place. We figured out we could subtract or count up to figure it out. We decided to use the Circle, Split, Subtract with a Number line strategy that we had learned. It worked! 🙂 And….Thanksgiving started a long time ago. 🙂

Whew! It feels good to be back in the blogging game again. 🙂 Thanks for coming back to read!

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of October 12-16, 2015

This week we began a new unit on adding and subtracting within 100 (which is actually a unit we had last year, as well, so should be something that we remember. Should…time will tell if that’s true. LOL 🙂 ).

This time around we’re focusing more on making sure mathematicians are flexible and can show their thinking in more than one way. As with last time, we’ll also make sure they can choose a strategy appropriately based on the numbers (rather than just which strategy the like best or is easiest for them), and we’ll also continue to work on being clear with our communicating our mathematical thinking.

Here we go!

The first strategy we worked on for this unit is called HTO, or hundreds/tens/ones. Yeah, it’s kind of an obvious name for what they are doing, so I guess it works. 🙂

Each kiddo has a workbook where we’re showing our thinking, and I had to share what Emily’s looked like after I taught this strategy. She kind of liked it. 🙂

Um…she did every single problem on that page! AND she asked if you could take it home and practice more for homework. SURE!!

Here’s more about how that strategy works:

First you mark the first number on the chart (98) and then add on tallies to show the second number (31). Then look to see if you can find any tens or ones you need to move over to the next column. Finally, add down the columns to find your answer.

Ok, so this post is a little misleading, because that was the only warm-up I have to share. The rest is more from what we did in our conversations in math. Hope that’s ok. 🙂

On Friday, we started another strategy that is Adding on the Numberline (and actually using another strategy called Circle/Split/Add):

The little cloud up in the corner was because we estimated whether the answer would be greater or less than 100. This would apply what we know about place value, and help us know if our answers make sense.

We still have a strategy or two to teach, and then we’ll just practice them until they’re solid. The thing I have to keep reminding kiddos (especially those that are focused on being RIGHT and being FAST) is that this unit is as much as communicating and being flexible as it is about finding the right answer (although, OF COURSE that’s also expected. 🙂 ).

The Writing Process–in Math??

Yep, you read correctly. We’ve been learning the writing process–mainly in regards to our work in Writers’ Workshop–but also in math!

A few years ago, when our school started working with Cathy Fosnot and Mathematics in the City, I learned about how many parallels there are between communicating in mathematics and communicating in most any other setting. At the time it was kind of mind-blowing to think about how mathematicians revise and edit their work just like authors. After hearing more, and thinking it through, and then trying it with kids, it made sense.

So…as with many other things I learned about with older kids, and protocols that I know work well with any age, we’re talking about the writing process in mathematics again. In 2nd grade. 🙂

The first unit we worked through this year was about place value, and was related in many ways to money; this made sense to kiddos and helped them think through how to “trade” 1s for 10s, 10s for 100s and just how to make groups in different ways to “make” a number.

One day they were challenged to consider this story:

With their elbow partner they were supposed to figure our the answer to that question: If Jerry has $1000 to share, with how many people could he share a $10 bill?

Kiddos worked for almost 2 math periods to figure out their answer (which was really the answer to the question of how many 10s are in 1000) and clearly share their thinking on a poster. For many, the answer of how many people was easy, the way to share their ideas not so much.

As a means of helping them know when they were “finished,” we discussed these parameters for their work:

After we had our posters finished, we were ready for our gallery walk. During a Gallery Walk, students put their posters out for other mathematicians to read and comment upon–with the goal of helping deepen mathematical thinking and help create more meaningful representations. It works much like a writing celebration, which is a great connection because all of our kiddos know how to do that. 🙂

Before we were ready to start commenting on others’ work, we needed a review of how to make effective, meaningful notes on our friends’ work. We sat for a quick refresher using this flipchart:

Then we practiced recognizing helpful comments that followed the guidelines. I gave examples and non-examples, and then we modified the ones we have given a thumbs-down (which mean they were not specific, kind or math-related).

After that, we were off to work in our gallery walk.

We did pretty great with our first walk of the year, and I’m sure kiddos brought their kindergarten and first grade knowledge with them to help as they shared their thoughts with other groups. I was impressed with how questions were used and kids were specific with what parts didn’t make sense or that they thought others could improve upon.

After adding comments, partners were given a few minutes to review what others had shared. In order to debrief and think about how to use this to help us next time, partners had to share out with the larger group one thing they would do to revise their poster to make it better (and ideally we’d have taken time to actually revise them, but we ran out of time!). Next time we are ready for a math congress and gallery walk, we’ll definitely come back to this moment and remember what we learned. 🙂

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of 9-14 to 9-18, 2015

We are in the middle of a unit on place value in second grade. The warm-ups this week took on a little bit of a different spin, as a couple of times kiddos were expected to finish up work from the previous day’s Math Workshop. That then became how we started math groups later in the day (I hope that last sentence wasn’t confusing…).

Monday

On this day, we were working on modeling numbers in bundles of 100s, 10s and 1s, like we had done during our place value challenge the week before.

Lesson 2 Problem Set:

Tuesday

Pretty exciting question, huh? See the example of what this page looked like below the picture.

Thursday

On Tuesday during math we had been focusing on representing a number in many ways, so I gave them a quick one to remind them of word form and expanded form.

Friday

Another one….we also practiced the word numeral for number form, as well as focusing on making sure our numbers go the right way (as we still have some friends who forget. 🙂 ).

Math Place Value Challenge

I mentioned on the math warm-ups post that we had been working on place value, and that mathematicians had a challenge to figure out how many sticks were in a big ‘ole pile. They were given a small group (their partner plus another partnership) and two questions: How many sticks do you have? How can you count them in a way that will be easy to show someone else what you’re doing?

Each group was given a pile of popsicle sticks and they got busy!

A group collected bundles of ten in their box as they went along.

As I went around to each group, I asked how they had decided what to do, and how they were determining how many sticks they had. Most were bundling in 10s (yay!) and I nudged them to make an even easier way to see how much is in a big pile. Could they continue to bundle and make a bigger group?

In the end, most groups ended up with bundles of 100, some 10s and–if their pile had any–some leftover 1s. They put their collections back in the tubs, and marked how many they had with a post-it note.

Then we worked for a bit on how to model the numbers we had made.

The next step was to figure out how many we had altogether. Many suggested that we could put our bundles together, but weren’t (at first) sure how to do that. We talked about how they had made their 100s bundles–with 10 10s–and then guessed that we might be able to make some more 100s from the loose 10s in everyone’s tubs.

Left with a massive pile of 100s, that eventually led us to thinking there must be a better way to show how much that pile had in it. I asked if they thought we could bundle any bigger numbers and honestly most of them thought I was crazy! I just began collecting 100s in my arms and counting: 100, 200, 300, 400….and they got the idea. They going until they got to…10 100s! That was a great conversation next about what number we had just made. 10 100? We figured out that it was a 1000, and that when we said “10 100” that helped us know about how many bundles were inside, but that it wasn’t the right way to say the number. We stretched a big ‘ole rubber band and made a 1000 bundle!! We counted the whole thing and agreed that we had one-thousand, four-hundred twenty-six sticks!

But how in the world do you WRITE the number one-thousand, four-hundred, twenty-six? We gave it a go. Many of us remembered that when we went from 2-digits to 3-digits it was a 100s number, and since we had 4 groups of sticks, maybe that meant our number had 4-digits…

Our model of this number–1,426–looked like this:

Many minds were blown as we figured out how many 100s and 10s were inside that big number. We figured out that it was actually than just what the digit said, because of all of the groups inside of groups. I loved how many kiddos kept saying, “Wow, this is fun!” and “Man, we’re learning so much today!” Definitely lots of great mathematical thinking happening here!

UPDATE: I got this email after the first posting of this story. Love this stuff! Thanks for sharing, Shannon. 🙂

Hi Jennifer!

You had so many math posts on the blog this weekend, that I wanted to share a story with you. We have a Curious George story CD in the car that we listen to a LOT and in one of the stories George gets 10 dozen doughnuts. The other day when this story was on, Millie asked me if 10 dozen was 120! I was so surprised! I said that it was and asked her how she knew that. She told me “5 2’s are 10, and then another 5 2’s makes 20 and 10 10’s is 100 so, 120”. It took me more than a minute to follow the math just because it wasn’t how I was used to thinking of problems, but she was totally right and I saw this “new” math stuff in action :). It was kinda cool! She was doing multiplication and didn’t even know it. Thanks for teaching her such great foundational skills that allow her to do these kinds of problems in her head!

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: 8-24 to 9-4 (2 weeks worth!)

We’re in the swing of some things in 2nd grade. Math warm-ups are one of those things–just I’m not yet in the swing of writing about them! Here are last few warm-ups we’ve been working on:

Monday

Even though we worked on this last year, many kiddos had a hard time with the answer to this question. We’ve since been doing many things (games, two-pen tests, conversations) to help us remember (or learn!) our doubles, near doubles and combos of 10. They all form the basis for the bigger things we’ll do with numbers later on.

Tuesday

While I’m not entirely sure about the order of these next few warm-ups, the concept that is highlighted in them all is certain–the importance of place value. Here was another that many had a hard time with. Most of their answers were “I don’t know yet...”

Wednesday

Thursday

Tuesday, 9-1

This one was an easy connection to the essential question (EQ) I had asked earlier. They had to think about place value to answer this one, knowing which numbers to add to each other.

Wednesday

Although not related to place value, this warm-up was related to a conversation we had had in math workshop the day before, and is definitely something all 2nd graders need to know how to do–tell time! Often I will spiral older concepts into math warm-ups to keep them on the front of our minds!

Thursday

This warm-up, although badly worded, gave kiddos a little peek into a task I would have them do later that day in math workshop. The question was really about the most efficient way to count a big ‘ole stack of something, which they’d have to do with a pile of popsicle sticks in a group that afternoon. I was happy to see how many of them were already thinking about bundling into 10s and 20s (rather than counting them all by 1s).

Friday

The warm-up on Friday was actually the end of the lesson from Thursday, and mathematicians completed their thinking with their learning partner in their math journal, which is different from how they MWU normally works. I love how we can adapt this structure to work for our needs! Since many of us have been doing this for a whole year now, it was easy to make that little tweak and still have them know what to do. In this warm-up, kiddos were asked to model the counting we had done together the day before.

Getting Started with Math: How Much is Your Name Worth?

In the first days of school, our goals are both that kids get into subjects as well as that they build relationships with each other (just like last year!). One of our first forays into math this year was with a challenge about names.

The original activity was called “How Much is Your Name Worth?” and was all about how each letter of your name is worth a certain amount (i.e. a=1, b=2, c=3, etc.). While it was definitely a math challenge for some (we might have forgotten how to add over the summer!! LOL), it was also a reminder of how sometimes things are harder than we thought and we need to work through the tough parts.

For me, it was also an invitation to revisit the activity I was asking them to do and change what was tricky. Not because I wanted to make it easier, but because we realized that the directions on the first try were really confusing. Some were stuck with what to do, not how to do it. So I made a new sheet, and also invited a new question to the challenge that they could attempt with a partner (which added another level to the activity). Their new question was:

The other thing that happened here was watching kids as they solved the problem of who’s name was most expensive by thinking about both the length of the names, and which letters were included. There were resources everywhere that could help them if they knew they were there: the lunch sheet, our checkoff grids, the word wall, the helper chart, our mailboxes, our cubbies–the list went on and on!

In the end we didn’t really ask the question of who’s name was most expensive, but we all got our math brains moving, solved some problems together and worked with our friends! That’s a great start in my book!

Getting Started in Second Grade

Wahoo! We’re finally getting started! I spent some time getting ready, and it was fun to stop getting ready and finally get started! And since we’re looping, it has definitely been fun doing just that. I was looking back at the beginning of the year from last year to see what I had written about, and MAN–our kiddos were BABIES!! You should take a look and see how much all those munchkins have grown since last fall.

As is usual fashion for me here on 20somethingkids, I have TONS of stories to tell you! I am making a list of it all here, partly to help me make sure I get it all in, but also just in case you want a place to land to find it all. Once I add the post, I’ll link to it on this page and you can easily find it again. Ok, here we go!!

Over the last few weeks, we have done so many things!:

Marshmallow Challenge: Second Grade Style
Getting Started with Reading: Reading museum
Getting Started with Writing: Tiny Notebooks

Tiny Notebooks: Sharing

Self-Portraits
Appleletters
Reflection with plusses and deltas
2nd Day of 2nd Grade Selfies
Getting Started with Math: How Much is Your Name Worth?
Weak side/Strong side
Anchors of Learning
Math Warm-ups 8-18 to 8-2

…yet

I Hope You Make Mistakes

I know there were many things crammed into those first days together, but when I see it all in a list, I’m still amazed. Let’s get into it!

Things I Learned on My Summer Vacation

Summer is one of my favorite times of year. I love being able to sleep in and stay up late. I LOVE traveling and exploring new places (or revisiting old, favorite places for the 20th time hee hee). Most of all, I love the time to be able to read, write, learn and really digest new things that I don’t have time to attend to during the busyness of the school year. I thought I’d share some of that learning I’ve been doing. First up–math! You probably don’t know about this fabulous place in NYC called Mathematics in the City. And if that is true, then you also don’t know about the amazing teacher leader/trainer/consultant/math guru named Kara Imm. Man, I’m sorry for you, and want you to book a flight right now. Seriously it’s worth every penny. It’s ok. I’ll wait. 🙂 So, anyway, my experiences with Kara go back to a couple of years ago when she first came to Kirkwood to help us learn more about fractions. Yes, I survived. I learned alot and I even had some fun along the way. I definitely began to understand fractions in a way that I know I didn’t when I was in school. That new understanding really helped me as I then taught my 5th graders (at the time) to truly understand fractions and what they mean, not just how to do an algorithm or figure out a formula. She then came back a year or so later and helped us through a lesson study–again with fractions–and we learned a little more. Well, fast-forward to today (a couple of years later), and we were lucky to have Kara back AGAIN. This time she worked with our whole staff, around many math topics, and helped us all bond as we figured out how to best help kids understand mathematics. One thing I love about the way Kara presents is that there is ALWAYS some teacher-doing-math time. I never did that kind of thing until I went to a writer’s workshop presentation many years ago and they had me write (which I thought was totally weird). From that first moment, I totally got how important it is, though, for teachers to feel the same struggles and frustrations as their students go through. We got to work through many hard investigations and work through them the way our kids would. It was really interesting that for many of us, these problems were made harder than they needed to be, though, because of the way WE learned fractions. Like I mentioned before, I wasn’t taught the WHY but just the HOW, which in many ways is not the easiest or most efficient/effective way to solve the problem. So, giving this same investigation to 5th graders who don’t have a UNLEARN many inefficient strategies isn’t really that bad. Our kids are not so confused and frustrated as we are. We did two big problems: one called Muffles’ Truffles (which involved early multiplication) and another with a scenario about Frank, a farmer, and how far he drives. It’s a problem that involves a gas tank and figuring out (with fractions) if Frank has enough to get him where he’s supposed to go. While there’s not really any way to truly understand the scale of our conversations and they work we did without being there, here are some notes that my partner and I used to draft our thinking. There’s also a picture of the chart we made for our Math Congress (which is a topic I haven’t written much about but TOTALLY should!), which was a way to consolidate and present our final draft to the other mathematicians.

We talked multiplication and we talked fractions, we talked Math Congress (nope, haven’t written about it yet…), and we also discussed the topic of basic facts. This is a hot topic in math these days (and for a while, really), and for many years we’ve responded with daily kill-and-drill activities, timed “mad minutes,” and crazy stressing out on memorizing lots and lots of facts. Kara brought some info related to how important it is to respond in a different way.

For many people (including teachers, parents and students), being QUICK is best. But we were reminded that being quick doesn’t equal being mathematically PROFICIENT, which should really be our goal. She gave us information on how facts DEVELOP, they don’t come first. She also helped us see that the facts (in this case we focused on multiplication tables) are not random (which is how many kiddos see them, saying “there must be 100s and 100s to learn!”), but are connected. Seeing those connections and building on the RELATIONSHIPS between facts is how to both LEARN them and UNDERSTAND them rather than just MEMORIZE them. For many this was mind-blowing, and for others it was validation of what we already knew to be true. For sure, though, it was nice to be “allowed” to deal with learning facts in a different way going forward.

My notes from Day 1 of our Math Institute.

More notes from Day 1. It seems I was so busy DOING math on Day 2 that I didn’t write anything down!

One more important topic of discussion (and of course we experienced them, too!) was number strings. In short, these are a related set of problems that kiddos use mental math to solve. Practice is done regularly (maybe even every day), and these help mathematicians become more flexible as well as see the relationships and connections mentioned earlier. I’ll write more about this next part later (yeah, like I said I would with Math Congresses), but one way we learned to assess newly gained knowledge is to use a two-pen test. Yep, it’s just what it sounds like: a test you take with two different pens. The first one is a timed portion to see what kiddos know how to do quickly, and then the second pen is used to finish the rest of the page, with whatever time frame is needed. Teachers can get all kinds of useful information about what facts kids know and which ones they still need to work on. Genius. We will definitely be trying these out in 2nd grade this year!

Whew. That was a lot. I know I tend to be long-winded, so if you hung in this long I TOTALLY appreciate you. 🙂

Now I ask you–what did you learn on your summer vacation?

See? Minds blowing!

20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher

Starting a 3rd Grade Journey

Tag Archives: math workshop

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of February 8-11, 2016

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of November 16-20, 2015

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of October 12-16, 2015

The Writing Process–in Math??

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of 9-14 to 9-18, 2015

Math Place Value Challenge

Second Grade Math Warm-Ups: 8-24 to 9-4 (2 weeks worth!)

Getting Started with Math: How Much is Your Name Worth?

Things I Learned on My Summer Vacation