Solve the Room (again!)

I posted about Solve the Room back in January and I'm here to share some more...

Those of you who don't know about Solve the Room... you might know about it but just call it something different... Read the Room.... Scoot.... Roam the Room.

It is a very easy to implement... you put cards up around the room (by mid-year or earlier I have my kiddos put up and take down cards)...

Give students an answer sheet & a clipboard... (all of my Solve the Room products have a similar answer sheet like this one...)

And then let your students move about solving the room!

Solve the Room is DEFINITELY something I have to model at the beginning of the year... Voices are off (unless you're asking a friend quietly for help to find a card), look at the card, figure out the answer, then record - in the correct box! The modeling time pays off because after one or two sets of Solve the Room cards, my students can do this completely independently during Math rotations, allowing me to teach the small group in front of me without putting out any fires, and that makes for a happy teacher!

Clicking here will bring you to my TPT store with the search "Solve the Room" already plugged in. You'll find Solve the Room products that will work with grades 1, 2 and 3.

And here are some of my newest Solve the Room products - great for 1st and 2nd grade!

And if you want all these at a reduced price, bundled together...

Do you use solve the room in your class? Let me know in the comments!

Has it REALLY been that long?

Oh man! I didn't realize how long it'd been since I last posted! For the sake of being OVERWHELMED with all I have to say I'm linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching to make me stick to FIVE things on this lovely Friday!

Shadow day is always a hit! We ventured out on a breeze day in April to measure our shadows every hour-hour and a half. It is such a fun but crazy interrupted day! We love seeing how our shadows move and shrink throughout the day. One of my grade level partner's kiddos said "my shadow shrunk like my underwear does in the dryer!" Out of the mouths of babes!

We just started our shape unit last week and have been using tons of foldables from Blair Turner's Interactive Notebook!

We also played some guessing games, asking questions to guess our shape. The questions were: how many sides does the shape have? How many vertices does the shape have? How many corners/angles does my shape have? Are any of the sides equal length? Are the sides parallel?

We worked hard through April and are just now wrapping up our Fairy Tale unit. Some of my high flyers used this 3-way comparison chart to compare 3 different versions of Cinderella. They did such a nice job showing the very specific similarities and differences!

 

If you haven't heard of any of the I Read to You, You Read to Me books you definitely have to check them out! We LOVED the fairy tale version to get us started on fairy tales and they are WONDERFUL for fluency AND point of view... so many uses! 

My kiddos were obsessed for nearly a month, asking to do more activities with them! Definitely check them out if you haven't! There are also a Mother Goose, Scary Tales and Fables versions too!

Finally, I'm hoping to do a full post on having a student teacher, but here's a peak at my student teacher playing a Mystery Place Value game!


WOW it felt awesome to post again on here :) Thanks to those of you tuning in!

Five for Friday (on a Friday!)

Hey all, I'm actually linking up on a Friday for a change! Late on Friday, but still Friday!
Also doing a little blast from the past in this post because it's been a while!

A few weeks ago we were delving into our money unit! We love the game Rich Robots! I found it here a while back. It's a great introduction to coins.

More Money, Money, Money! We love Blair Turner's Interactive Notebook! This great activity had flaps that made this sheet into a fun flap book. Check it out here.

For my grad class, I did a co-teaching action research project on topic & detail with one of my favorite co-workers! Here my kiddos are getting serious about topic & detail!

I have a student teacher right now (part of why I haven't posted much, it's actually a lot of work!) but let me tell you, it is making it SO much easier to do reteach! I grabbed a group of kiddos who struggled with subtraction with regrouping and did a little reteach activity today. I got this game from Amy Lemon's I Can Regroup Addition & Subtraction Centers!

Check out my new favorite app Shadow Puppet! My students wrote How To stories and recorded them using this app! It's basically a really fun presentation app. You can do a lot more with it than my kiddos did on their first try, but seriously so fun & such great final products.

Check out one of my favorites by clicking the image above.

Solve the Room

I'm sitting here on this snowy afternoon adding to some of my TPT products, and thought it would be fun to talk about Solve the Room in my classroom.

You might call it Scoot or Read the Room or Write the Room or Roam the Room... in my room we call it Solve the Room.

I have created and downloaded lots of these activities and my kiddos LOVE them! I am all about learning while moving and motor breaks and brain breaks and lots of transitions to keep them up and moving. I usually make Solve the Room a rotation during math Workshop. It is usually the favorite rotation.

Right now I only use Solve the Room for math, but I'd love for any thoughts you wonderful readers have about using these types of activities in reading or writing!

I want to share some of the products I've created and are tried, true and tested in my room and my grade level partners' rooms!

Solve the Room Addition...

Solve the Room Subtraction...

Solve the Room Money...

Solve the Room Time...

 Solve the Room Place Value...

Check these products out! My kiddos love them and they align with CCSS standards in our math units that I use them in. I hope you either like these products or are motivated to create your own to get your kiddos moving around the room and doing math at the same time!

Hello New Year!

Well I haven't blogged since before our winter break... but I'm back! Anddd linking up a day late to Doodlebugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

New Year's Resolution time... My teaching resolution is to work even harder to get Whole Brain Teaching techniques into every lesson and into our day more often. This means... more gestures, more use of the scoreboard, more references to our rules & more consistent use of the Super Improver Wall. If you want to know about any of those wonderful WBT goodies, check out my WBT tab & hop into a WBT Wednesday (which I PROMISE I will get back into!!! especially now that I "met" fellow WBTer Heidi over at Droppin' Knowledge who also does a WBT Wednesday.

I'm so excited to be working with one of our amazing reading consultants & my fabulous teammates & one of our special education teachers to start a new fluency block during our week. We sorted our second graders into types of readers and are each taking a group of 10 or less kiddos and teaching fluency geared at the types of reader we have.

Our reading consultant introduced this awesome fluency book that is really guiding us through this process. Right now we are meeting 2x a week for 15 minutes and will reassess in 6 weeks to see how much our students' fluency has improved.

I've had the somewhat bad habit of coming up with math games on the fly lately... but this one was a hit for working with double digit subtraction WITHOUT regrouping. Grab it for free...

To play, just have your kiddos roll a dice 3 times (I had them roll a double dice and a 12 sided dice - 10, 11, 12 kiddos picked any number). They fill in the boxes with the numbers they rolled, being sure they create a larger number on top.

I also created this one this week to practice counting back by 10's before we delved too deeply into double digit subtraction. It was a nice little refresher on Monday to get back into school mode.

This was a little less "last minute" and even has directions right on the top of the page for ya ;)

We've been working hard on nonfiction text features. The kiddos loved this super simple activity this week. We had a shortened amount of time due to our new fluency rotations so I gave each partnership a nonfiction book about animals (National Geographics for Kids series) and 4 pieces of highlighting tape. Their job was to try to find a heading, a caption, a map and a label and they only had 5 minutes to do it. They did SUCH a great job. Every group whose book had all 4 of these features found them. A few of the books didn't have maps, but those groups found the other 3 without a problem :)

 

And finally, I just can't help but share the AWESOME gift my students' families got for me... talk about the coolest teacher chair ever!!! I am so lucky for the group of families I have this year!


I hope you all had a great holiday and are starting the New Year off right!