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Free Math Common Core Tasks
I just ordered these Battista books to help implement the common core math standards for each grade level at school. To my delight, the books list a link to extra free resource tasks! There is a book for place value, multiplication and division, fractions, geometric measurement, and addition and subtraction, hence there are FREE resources for all of these.
These free tasks are at Heinemann, the publisher’s website. To access the free resources, first click on the book icon of the topic you are interested in.
Next click on the link that says “companion resources”. This will take you to all of the free tasks for that particular math book.
Here is a sample of one of the tasks:
Wondering What the PARCC Assessment Will Look Like?
Now there is less to wonder about. Admittedly living in disequilibrium and uncertainty all year about how students will be tested in the future, I now see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. I perused the PARCC assessment items that are up to view. There are now more questions up than there used to be, so now I have a better understanding of how students will be asked common core questions. Now I know how rigorous I need to be in my question asking of students. I suggest you take a look to if you are one of the PARCC states.
I noticed that students are doing a lot of writing about their mathematical thinking, so it looks like math journals will come in really handy. Also, students answer questions in which there could be more than one right answer or more than one way to arrive at the answer. They also seem to love fraction number line questions!
Here is the site. http://www.parcconline.org/samples/mathematics/grade-3-mathematics Click on the grade level you want to look at.
Then click below to access the tasks. Also take the time to read about the 3 different types of tasks.
Then click on Elementary School Tasks.
Another Great Common Core Resource with Free Tasks
I’ve just been searching to see if there are new PARCC assessment items out so that I could have a glimpse at the way we will be tested. I have checked periodically this year to see what the PARCC items will be like, but there was never much available to see. Well, while clicking on the tasks I was taken to another page which has lots of sample free common core tasks which are VERY similar to the PARCC assessment Here is the site: http://www.illustrativemathematics.org. Just click on the right sidebar where it says illustrations.
You will have to click along the bottom on the blue numbers to go to higher grades.
Fun and Easy Tool to Teach Number Sense for Kinesthetic Learners
Here is my absolute favorite session from NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics). The presenter was a lady from Canada who brought The Learning Carpet for us to see. The learning carpet is a 10 by 10 grid of empty squares that you can use for many things, but it is especially useful for a large 100′s chart.
The number cards are 6 1/2 inches square and made out of card stock. Students in groups of five can see how fast they can place the number cards on the carpet. This can be easily differentiated by giving the easier numbers to the struggling learners and the larger numbers to the students who need a challenge.
Students can also be asked to pick up the numbers whose digits makes sums of 10 or any number. Students will start to see patterns such as how different sums follow diagonals. I felt dumb when she showed us this because I had never noticed that the sums make diagonals.
In the above picture you can see the gray squares on the mat. You could easily make this on a tarp with paint or tape to show the number boxes. The gray boxes are 6 1/2 inches and the black stripes on the grid lines are 1/2 an inch. If I made one of these carpets, I would make the squares actually bigger so that feet could more easily fit inside the boxes. I ordered the book with all the games that you can play so I could make my own if I wanted. Next year, there may be money in the budget to actually purchase some of the carpets.
The amazing thing about the fact that there are no numbers on the grid actually teaches more number sense. Students are made to think about number relationships to find spaces on the grid. If asked to find any number on the blank grid students have to understand the relationships between the numbers. For example, if trying to find 57 on the grid, students will know that all the sevens are in a column so that 57 will be in the column with sevens. A marker can be thrown on the grid and then students have to tell what number space that it landed on. They can walk on the carpet to help them figure it out.
The grid can be used for bar graphs or coordinate grids. The grid can also be used for area and perimeter like below.
There are so many fun activities you can do with this carpet, and I love the idea of the students actually being able to get up and stand on it to be involved. If you want to order the resources you can buy learning carpets and resources here. The kindergarten teacher who designed these is in Canada, and this is the only place you can buy them. They don’t sell through a larger distributor like Amazon etc. I have no stock in these, I just think that it is a great idea whether you order the ones she makes or make your own.
Try This Incentive to Encourage Students to Count to 100
The idea of belonging to a club makes kids feel like they belong. With that said, one of our kindergarten teachers came up with the idea of belonging to the “100 Club”. What does it take to belong to the 100 Club? Well, you guessed it…you must be able to count to 100! I took this idea a step further and suggested that we hang all of the kids pictures on the wall that were in the 100 club. We will add to this as the remaining students are able to count to 100. The kids have taken an extra interest in counting to 100 especially if their pictures aren’t on the wall! This display of the students’ pictures has grabbed students’ attention of course as well as parents and staff members. We even have a kindergartener that told her teacher, “I counted to 100 in my pillow 3 times last night before I went to bed.” 
Do your students know what a group is? or what a group of ten is?
I’ve been wanting to incorporate counting collections at school for a while, but I haven’t had the understanding of how to organize counting collections effectively. I recently attended a colleague visit where a kindergarten teacher showed the procedures she used for teaching counting collections. So, after attending this training, I initiated counting collections at our school with the 1st and kindergarten teachers. In the meantime, one of the kindergarten teachers shared with me at school that she realized her students didn’t know what a group was– much less know what a group of ten was. She began her instruction with just discussing groups and what kinds of things can come in groups. They talked about groups of three, four, or six etc. They made groups of different amounts in whole group discussion under the document camera. Students were able to have a foundation to understand a “group of ten.” Then the teacher was able to place a different amount of counters underneath the camera to ask if she had a group of ten. First, she placed less counters under the camera like 8 and asked if she had a group of ten. After that she placed more counters under the camera, like a group of ten and 3 more, and asked if she had a group of ten. Doing all of these seemingly common sense-ical counting procedures before hand led to a much more successful counting collections lesson for students to count their collections effectively. These are the rudimentary things that no college or textbook teaches you!
To read the valuable counting collections article from Teaching Children Mathematics, click here.
Use This Simple Idea to Make Patterns Explicit in Number Charts
When having second grade students explore patterns in number charts which were in increments of 300, it dawned on me to cover up some of the numbers to show students how the numbers repeated. I did this on the document camera. For those students who weren’t able to see the number patterns explicitly, this proved to be very helpful.
The number chart is shown above uncovered.
First, I left one column uncovered except for the hundreds place. Students were easily able to see how the hundreds place repeated.
Then I uncovered all but the tens place. Students saw that the tens place goes up by one ten going down each row.
Finally, I uncovered all except the ones place and students were able to see that the ones place remained the same ALL the way down the chart.
In case you are interested, these number chart printables to 1,200 are available here. There are fill in number charts too.
Smart Board lessons that match the printables are available here which may work even better for showing the patterns with the screen shade.
Great Free Assessments for Each Common Core Standard K-2
We owe North Carolina another thank you for the awesome common core resources that they have helped us all with. Now, I have discovered these common core assessments for K-2 for EVERY standard. They are all downloadable Word document files. Just follow the red arrow in the picture below to know where to click for your grade level.
Below is an example of one of the second grade geometry tasks. You could copy and paste these directly to your lesson plans. The addition and subtraction tasks have word problems already written. Also, I like how they provide a checklist on the side of the task so you can track students’ mastery.
It gets better! There are black line masters to go with the tasks!
Are Your Students Mixing Up the Hour When Telling Time? Try This
Yesterday, I modeled a lesson in a second grade classroom for students who were struggling with telling time to the nearest 5 minute intervals. Students had the classic problem with telling time. When the hour hand was close to the next hour students mistakenly wrote the hour an hour ahead. For example, when students read the time 8:55, they would write 9:55 instead because the hour hand nearly touched the 9. To alleviate this confusion I used and adapted the idea from the free Georgia Curriculum resources (page 57). Unlike the clock instructions in the Georgia resources, I used sentence strips which I cut up, and paper clips which I threaded through the holes. I ran out of brads, so I used what was available.
To begin my lesson on time, I stretched out the clock on sentence strips in a linear fashion. Then I held my hour hand clock arrow under the numbers and moved it along and asked students what hour it was. I explained to students that until the arrow point was directly on the next number AND in this case color, that the previous number still remained the hour. Students proved to be more successful in telling time on an analog clock after this discussion.
Then after the discussion with the linear clock using the hour hand, I had several student helpers hold the clock in a circle so that they could see how the linear clock compared to the round clock on the wall. I repeated my questioning holding the hour hand in between the numbers and asking them what hour was being shown.
Need Activities to Teach Counting?
I was so excited to get these unifix books that I ordered. With there being a shortage of counting activities in our regular kindergarten textbook, I was eager to find more. These simple and practical books for kindergarten and first grade offer several counting activities like the following:
- Shapes that students cover with cubes to see how many cubes will fill the shape. Students count the number of cubes that fill the shape.
- Cards with a different number of shapes on them that students match to numbers cards.
- Number cards to match to plastic baggies with cubes in them.
- Games like “First to Fifty” in which students spin a number spinner to draw a certain amount of cubes to cover a board. Students can count how many they have left to cover.
There are some other good number sense activities included also. These are available at Didax for $13.95.
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