Give-away

I am participating in this fabulous giveaway!  She has so many products that have been donated- check out her website here and enter to win some great products!

Somedays Sundays are so frantic getting everything done and making sure that I have all the materials ready for the upcoming week.  But lately I've been spending time on Sundays thinking more deeply about my instruction.  I go through phases and right now I am in a math phase (probably why it was difficult for me to finish my literacy pocket chart station- see yesterday's post).  So I've been thinking a lot about my math time.  I had been doing math centers and just wasn't feeling like it was productive.  So, I struggled for a while to fill my math time with meaningful activities. But, right now, I am loving my math time.  So I thought I would devote this post to my ramblings (hopefully coherent ones) about my math time. 
Right now I begin math with some kind of number sense routine- count around the circle, tell me fast cards or counting on the hundreds chart on the smartboard.  It's quick and easy and it gets them focused on thinking about math.  After that, we do a daily math page from my monthly math products.  Check April's out here.  Then we turn it over to the back and do one or two word problems.  Lately, we've been working on comparing word problems.  We do those and then one or two students share them on the Smartboard and we talk about the strategies we used to solve them.  When we are finished with that, we've been doing a whole group focus lesson on subtraction.  We usually do a game of some kind from Kathy Richardson's books.  Then we come back together at the carpet and talk about what math we did.  I use this time to reinforce the math vocabulary that describes what we did.  We talk about the strategies we used to do the math that day and the tools with which we worked.  I have a little guilt that I am not doing centers but I feel good about what we're doing and the learning that is happening.