First Week Math Lesson Plans

Are you doing your lesson plans and not really sure where to begin? That was me a few years ago before I realized what was the most important thing to teach week ONE of school! I used to think I need to begin my curriculum day one, but no...! Expectations, expectations... and some more expectations!

I am here to share my math lesson plans with YOU for my first week of school! I always start off with the fun stuff... manipulatives! If I can get the kids using manipulatives correctly and playing games with a partner correctly then setting up the rest of my math block is seriously a breeze! No JOKE!

These are my objectives for the first week of school:
I use these to help keep me focused because I do love to get distracted by other things! This keeps me in line with what is actually important!

As you see above, I am not focusing on the standards. Why? Well, because the standards are NOT going to get met if the kids don't know how to interact with materials and one another appropriately. Trust me! Do all this stuff NOW or you WILL be doing it allllll year long!

When setting these expectations, do not give the kids wiggle room to "misbehave" either. 

You need them to learn how to act correctly right away so you CAN get a move on it with your math curriculum.

Okay, now what you came for! Week ONE PLANS!! 

Please keep in mind, I will do my very best to stick to the plans below but if my kids aren't doing well with noise level for example, then we will be reconvening and practicing a LOT!

If you click on the image below, you can download my plans and click on the pictures to be taken to that math activity.

The great thing about week one is that after it's done, the students will already know FOUR math games! Next week, I will begin introducing the technology center and students will begin to rotate through three math stations. We use Ipads in our classroom and a math program called ST Math.

Throughout rotations I will continue to assess students basic understandings of math and look for any red flags so they can be tackled right away!

I hope you found this post helpful!

For more blog posts about my math workshop, click the links below!!

Structuring Your Math Block

Tracking Data to Drive Your Instruction

Math Workshop Behavior Tips

Math Talk: Calendar With Purpose

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My Math Block & Place Value

I absolutely love to teach math to first graders! There is so much 'newness' and so many light-bulb moments! I always share pictures of my math block on Instagram, and it only makes sense to now do a little blog post to give you the lowdown of how I run it.

Here is a little glimpse at how I run my math block each day!

We start our math time with calendar time. 

Afterwards, I do a direct teaching lesson.

This is where I model the concept we are learning for the day.

This past week we began to learn about place value. One day, my direct instruction lesson was a read aloud! I read this book to students and I used my magnetic base 10 blocks on my whiteboard to help deepen their understanding.

After, I model the concept we are learning for the day, students participate in an activity to help deepen their understanding. I like to make this time as hands on as possible. 

Here students are counting materials. Our goal was to find strategies to make counting easier.

Some students made connections with the read aloud and figured out that making groups of 10's really is easier!! Some students didn't quite grasp that concept, so I made sure to help guide their thinking during this time. Differentiation right here ya'll!! Easy peasy!

Much of the time I like for students to record their thinking in some way. Here I simply gave students a blank white piece of paper. I told them to draw a picture of what they did, tell me the total and some groups were ready to tell me how many groups of tens they made and how many loose ones they had left over. Helloooo place value understanding!!! :-)

After our active learning time, I sometimes give them an activity sheet to complete so I can assess their understanding. We always come back together as a class and discuss our learning for the day. Then, students are off to work with their assigned math station for 20 minutes.

I project the timer onto the board for students to see. It really helps keep us all on track.

Find the online timer here.

The math stations that students do are concepts that have already been taught.

Here is our rotation board and where the stations are stored.

The kids visit one math station a day. ST math is completed on the Ipad and allows students to progress through first grade math concepts at their own pace. 

The On My Own station is where students complete an interactive math journal activity.

You can find this odd and even math journal activity here.

Tubs 1, 2 and 3 contain hands on math station activities like the batty addition sort seen below.

If students finish their math tub activity early, then they can choose a math game to play until math station time is over.

While students work on their math stations, I pull a group of students who need additional support, review of old concepts or I pull my high groups for a 'challenge' activity.

Sometimes, I will pull kids who are doing one of the math tub activities and do it with them, if I know this is a concept they struggle with.

You can also read another math workshop post from me here!

Have a fabulous day!!

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Math Workshop this year!

Hey all! So, a few days ago I shared how Reading Workshop runs in my classroom and today I'm going to share how I've been math workshop-ping it up in this year with the kids! If you are a K-2 teacher and you are curious about math workshop then you're in luck! I did a post last year for my first grade classroom on math workshop and you can find it here.

My math workshop from 1st to 3rd, honestly, isn't that drastically different. You all know how much I love hands on stuff and well... I am going to keep the hands on stuff present in my third grade classroom... the kids LOVE IT!! I always say they love stuff... ha ha - maybe I should take a survey?! Anywho... Here is how it runs this yea: (so far) ;)

Here is my daily schedule too for this year in case you were wondering about my day.

This lesson was on number patterns and you can grab it here.

 You can find these football math stations here.

If you haven't heard of adapted mind, then... um... you might want to take a look.

It's awesome! It has videos that teach kids concepts at their levels. So, if they need review...ba boom- there it is. If they're ready to move on.. KaPOW... it does it for you! AND!!!!... You can to see their progress... AND they're super motivated because they earn cool badges!!

Another cool online math program is called Ten Marks... this is totally free AND directly correlates to the Common Core! So, you are doing standard 3.OA.9?... Guess what... there are practice questions for the students to do. I assign this as homework! It's awesome, easy AND again, you can see their progress! I'll be posted more about these two soon: but, until then... I would check this out ASAP if I were you!

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Math 'Workshop' In My Classroom!

I have to be honest and say that I had total full intentions of trying math workshop using rotations but I just wasn't getting through a lesson a day like I needed to because of time constraints. So, with a little organizing I have the perfect math 'workshop' structure to fit my classroom needs. I've shared all kinds of information on reading instruction in my room but I've never mentioned math so here we go!

Here are some of the math products I used in what you see above:

March Math Notebook

March Mash-Up

Place Value Packet of Fun

Shapes Galore for the Common Core

Have a great week!!

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March Interactive Math Journal & (Freebies)

Who here just loves interactive math journals? I began this year not even knowing exactly what they were! Hard to believe! I browsed blogs and saw a ton of teachers using these on Instagram. They looked cool but sometimes kind of confusing... so inspiration--here it is! I wanted to make interactive math journals that students could do on their own. I have definitely succeeded. We complete an interactive math journal activity at least 3-4 days a week. (That topic is whole other post).

Here are some pictures of my new product: "March Interactive Math Journal."

It is late--sadly: So... It is discounted $1.00 for the whole month of March!

This activity is all about the fun and finding missing addends! It is a simple cut and glue everything on the math journal page and then spin and find where the number goes to fill in a missing addend!

Next week we my class is going to be learning all about symmetry so I whipped up this easy to complete activity for my assessment at the end of the week!

Students just color, cut out the shapes, fold them in half and then glue them under the correct header! 

This is showing just 1 of 5 of the number story interactive math notebook pages that I included in the March packet. I like this because it really helps my students organize their thoughts and learn the strategies when trying to solve those ever so challenging number stories.

Another activity is 3 digit addition! My students are so excited that they can add three numbers together and they LOVE practicing this new found skill.

All students do is glue on their addition problems. Then, add a glue dot and find their answer and glue it right on!

After they have them glued on then they have multiple mini-flip-books in their math notebook.

There are many, many more concepts covered in this packet!

Click below to check out it out!

You can head on over to my Facebook page to get two free pages from this packet!

Just click below:

I'll be back soon to share how I implement these in my room on a constant basis!

Stay warm!!

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Let's Talk About My Week (NOT)!

This week we had school for a whole 2 and a half days... Meaning... snow days on Monday and Tuesday with a 2 hour delay on Wednesday. I feel like I am so far behind in everything--especially math! But, that isn't what this post is about. It is about the randomness that I somehow compiled into our "week." I also think it will make due for a 5 for Friday. :)

This week we studied a tiny bit about the Arctic. We began our study with a quick video on you tube about the Arctic ocean and then broke out a shared reading passage from Arctic Adventures by: Stephanie Stewart. We focused a lot of the vocabulary from the passage and completed some reading detective questions. I had the students work with their reading buddies to complete the questions--let's just say we need more work with answering open ended reading questions & using complete sentences!

We also made a vocabulary poster to refer to when answer questions. (Silly me tore it down today after school so no picture).

Today, we wrote down things we learned about the Arctic on an anchor chart and made them into complete sentences. Then, students worked on their fact flip books and an Arctic craft!! 

Ready for a picture overload?

Basically, what I had the kids do is choose two new facts to write about on their flip books. They wrote two facts from the passage or the video we watched and wrote the facts on the outside of the flap book. Then, on the inside students drew a picture to show that they could understand the fact. They turned out great!!

I love how this little guy totally grasped the concept of how the sun needs to face the earth for day light and vise versa! I LOVE his picture!

Sorry for the blurriness of this one but I just loved the 'wind.'

I swear to get a good camera soon and stop using my I-phone one!

This week in math we learned some new games (all we had time for) and I introduced double digit addition.

 I took some base ten blocks, a tens and ones mat and made a worksheet to help us learn this ever so important concept. I even took it so far to tell students that this is a very important thing to learn... If we don't know double digit addition then it makes it hard to grocery shop! Where did that come from you ask? I have no clue... first thing that came to mind and out my mouth... you heard first grade gasps though and... ohh... we better pay attention so we can go grocery shopping!! ha ha!...life connection right there folks!!

We began the lesson in a circle on the rug. We do have a smart board in this classroom but sometimes I really think they learn this stuff best when they get to actually manipulate materials instead of  watching me drag stuff around on a board. 

I gave students a double digit addition problem and we identified which numbers were in the tens in ones place. We practiced noticing how the numbers were lined up in the addition problem. When we were practicing the tens and ones place the students were using base ten blocks to help them with that. (Mainly for my struggling kids) I showed the students two different strategies to complete double digit addition

I showed students how to complete addition problems by simply adding down the ones and tens place. We practiced circling them together so they knew which two numbers to add together. This worked very well for some. Folks, we had a LOT of light bulbs going off in math today!! Aren't those the best days? It was hard to teach but so rewarding. :)

I also taught students how to make both numbers separately with their base ten blocks in order to find the sum to a double digit addition problem. For example, if the addition problem was 22+12 then students would first take 22 base ten blocks and place it on their tens and ones mat. Then, they would move them to the top and add 12 more onto their mat. Students combined their base ten blocks and they had their answer to the double digit addition problem. This was great for my students who really struggle with addition period! 

Next, week I am going to pull students in guided math and work on this more because it was a tough! They even said, "My brain is tired."! That's when you know you had a good day in math! :)

Here is the double digit addition problem worksheet if you would like! Yes, FREE! :)

Just click below to grab this stuff!

Something else I have been doing in math is the interactive math journals.

I love the 'real' interactive math journal stuff and all the cute fold here and fold there stuff ... but, let's face it-

-1. their confusing, 2. they take a lot of time and... 3. yeah, I don't have time for that !!

So, I created some simple and easy to complete interactive math journal activities for my kids. This was first meant just to be a few activities and then it turned into a huge packet and now I am doing monthly ones. I just can't get enough and they LOVE it! Here is some of their work!

The activities are basically mini-stations that the students cut, glue and sort! I love it because it is just so interactive and really concrete for them! They are also able to complete these totally independently which is perfect for guided math time!

You can grab a total of 54 activities below!

Be on the look out for the February version! I hope to have it posted soon!

Hopefully, I will see you Sunday with my visual plans... that is if this new and upcoming Ohio storm doesn't hit us. Someone said 10-18 inches?!!! UGH!!!! Is it possible to say that I am tired of snow days?!!!!

Now, head over to doodle bugs for some more fun reads!

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