Ho! Ho! Ho! There's still no snow!

It's officially the middle December is Wisconsin, and we still have not had any snow (other than the 5 minutes during writing time last week that inspired many young writers and caused quite the commotion!)  Nevertheless, we are continuing on with our Christmas activities!  Maybe by January when we do the bulk of our Winter unit there will be some on the ground to reference!  Anyways, here are some of the fun thing in math we have been doing this week!

Math Station Activities

Ornament Color: students use 3 different colored unifix cubes and see if they can find all the different ways to line them up.  There are 6 ways total.  I am always amazed at how well the kids do with this activity!  I have them re-order their cubes and put it next to each ornament to see if it is the "same" or if they found a "new way".  For more of a challenge, I give kids 4 unifix cubes and see how many of the 24 ways they can find!  (I just put four of theses sheets on 1 piece of paper, and have them color the hook as the 4th spot on the ornament.)

You can pick up a copy of this HERE

Christmas Pattern Block Pictures: I originally had a pattern block present activity that I had gotten out of the Mailbox magazine years ago, but since I "misplaced" about half of my Christmas file, it is missing so this is what I had to create for a similar activity. Can you spot the errors in this student's work? 

HERE's a copy to save you the trouble of re-creating it should you misplace your file :)

Help Santa Grow his Beard: To practice the concepts of adding and subtracting, we play this fun Santa game.  Students roll the +/- dice and add/subtract that many cotton balls from Santa's beard.  To help work on sharing and playing fairly/correctly, I have each student use their own Santa board, but they are to share the die.

Santa's Sleigh Drop: I really like how this activity is worded, color coded, and the concept, and the kids did MUCH better than I thought they would!  They put presents in Santa's sleigh (which just happens to be a 10 frame) and then - oh no!- Santa's drops some and they have to figure out how many are left!  I used erasers as "presents" because they fit in the squares so nicely!  I can't take credit for this activity at all though - I got it HERE for FREE!

Tannenbaum tallies: I got this from Deanna Jumps' and Julie Lee's Winter Packet and the kids ROCKED the tally marks!  I was so impressed that they remember that "number 5 goes across them all" and to leave spaces between their groups of 5!  Yeah!

Present Patterns: For some reason my class LOVES to color this year, so I have been letting them color patterns.  I have a sheet like this for just about every season/month, and the patterns get harder as we go along.  Here we are coloring and labeling a pattern.  I always include a "make your own" pattern on the back to see who truly understands the concept of creating a pattern that repeats..."no.... red, blue, yellow, blue, green,  is not a pattern...."  :)

Finally, I stumbled upon a new blog http://livelaughlovek.blogspot.com/ and got a few new centers from there as well!  We will be doing those next week (yes, we have school until the 23rd!) so I will post those, along with some of our literacy centers next week.