Math Power Towers

Pintrest is so awesome. I found the idea for Math Power Towers from Pintrest. The original idea came from teachertipster.com.  My kids love them!! All you need is an empty Pringles can and some small bathroom size cups. I wrote multiplication facts on the cups, but you could write any math problem on it, sight words, vocabulary words,etc. The object of the game is to the biggest tower in a set amount of time. For my fourth graders they had 2 minutes to build their tower. I fit about 40 cups in a Pringles can.

Book Clubs

As a way to allow my students to become self-determined readers students have been discussing their books on Edmodo. If you don't know what Edmodo is you need to go check it out! Click on the link to see it in action in the classroom.  If I have 4 students in a reading group and 2 are done with their reading group assignment, they log onto Edmodo and start discussing the book. This is a huge motivator for the other 2 members to get their assignment done so they can join them. I post open ended questions to add to the discussion.Sometimes in place of meeting they discuss their books on Edmodo - it depends on the week. I still meet with the reading groups in addition to them discussing their books on Edmodo. My collegue, Annie Mitchell, presented  at TCEA earlier this month for Edmodo about the awesome ways she uses Edmodo in her classroom.

Another way I am going to facilitate the book clubs is by giving students bookmarks that have discussion sentence stems on it. This will help students stay focused on the discussion, lead to a more meaningful discussion, and help my shy kids and ESL kids participate in the discussion. 

Angry Birds Geometry Lesson

I came across some Angry Bird 3-D shape nets on Pintrest and I immediately knew my kids would love this! The templates were too small and there wasn't a lot of variety for 3-d shapes. My school purchased 3-D shape die cuts last year and I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to put them to use! I die cut several shapes in different colors and gave each student one. I modeled how to put fold the shape together and told them to decorate their own Angry Bird. Students came up with a name and they described their Angry Bird using geometry vocabulary we were studying.

      

                     

Some of my students asked if they could use a container to make a larger Angry Bird for extra credit. I told them absolutely!! They came out very cute!!