Belated Valentine's Day and Rounding Freebie

I wanted to post a few pictures of my students Splat Valentine's day creations.  Cara Carroll from http://thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com/ created a wonderful Splat Valentine's Day unit.  I was a little late in planning so we only read the Love, Splat and did the craftivity.  My students love Splat, so I splurged and bought the book and unit.  Honestly, if I had planned ahead I could have avoided the book purchase and checked the book out from the library - but the more prepared teachers beat me to it!  


We did our writing in Spanish.  Instead of writing, "I feel loved when...", we wrote, "Me siento amado(a) cuando...".  Here are some cute images of our Splats:

I also wanted to share a rounding activity we did this week.  Rounding is a difficult concept for most primary students, and our curriculum spends only one lesson on rounding and estimation.  I wanted to break this up to make sure my kids could master rounding before jumping to estimating.


We first spent a day creating number lines.  At first this seems like a waste of a day, but it was valuable for my kids to put their number lines together.  Some students still struggle with number sense, and they need to see how the pieces fit together.  Also, we have some white boards with number lines - but those number lines are broken into 5 pieces - I like that this on one long horizontal number line.


I laminated the number lines so my students could use Expo markers while they practiced rounding.  They first had to underline the number in question.  Then circle the tens it was in between and find the ten it was closest to. Some students were SPEEDY and I was able to give them some enrichment.  Overall, I found this activity to be a very successful because my kids felt so successful!  I love seeing them build confidence in themselves.


Here are some worksheets I made that break the process up a bit more than some math curriculum do.  I also created some estimation word problems.  I used my students' names and quirks to write them - I'm excited to see them put their rounding and estimation skills in action while reading about themselves!  Below if you click on the image it should take you to the google doc.  There is a pdf file with rounding, estimation, problem solving and exit slips you can download.  I use the exit slips at the end of a lesson to check and see how all my students are doing.

Cheers!
Mrs. Castro