There are so many fun activities to be had with money!
This particular one I developed for my third grade group, as one student really wanted the practice. Money helps with skip counting, addition facts, and can even be connected with fractions! It also has so many practical purposes, and can teach good spending/tracking habits. However, the beginning with money takes memorization, which can often be tricky for students to catch on to.
The activity I created involves each student being a food vendor. Every student visits each food stand and buys a good. Then, both students involved in the transaction track their spending. I related this to my own checkbook, and continuously helped them to relate spending money to subtraction & making money to addition.
My students absolutely loved this activity! The only thing I had to constantly remind them to do is track what they've bought.
The whole activity takes about 50 minutes, which I broke into three days (as one day was spent teaching it & visiting the vendor who had the lowest math fluency).
If you are interested, I created a PDF of all the resources, including an instructions sheet. It is offered for free on TeachersPayTeachers.
Visit my store and get this activity for FREE!
I hope your students enjoy this as much as mine did!
Today I worked with my 4th grade students on symmetry! This is covered by CCSS 4.G.3.
I started by introducing it with an anchor chart I created during lunch time. I drew ideas from my mind, as well as some other charts I found online. I also included the standard on it, as I like to keep my students informed as to the connection between what we're doing and what they need to know :)
Well, they were awesome and already knew most everything there is to know about symmetry and lines of it.
I then gave them a quick page from SuperTeacherWorksheets, using symmetry sketching & alphabet symmetry. They absolutely nailed it!
We then did an activity where the students turned their names into creepy symmetric aliens >:] THEY LOVED IT!
"This is great because we're getting to have a lot of fun, while learning math!" -Isaiah
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| Eerie, huh? |
Here are the steps!
1. Fold a piece of paper in half, hotdog style.
2. With the creased side of the paper down, write name in big letters (I recommend bubble letters! The bolder the better)
3. Go to window and trace the letters on the other side of the paper
4. Open up paper and connect all the letters where they meet in the middle
5. Decorate your alien! (I wasn't super clear about keeping them symmetric, but almost every student did anyway. I spoke with the student who didn't to make sure she understood!)
6. Proudly talk about your alien and its different features!
We had a blast, and all this only took about twenty minutes. We then did some different geometry work with the additional ten minutes we had together.
Overall it was a super successful day! :)
-Miss Cole
