Quarter one wrap up!

I can't believe that the quarter is over. Did that fly by or what? Here are some things that we have been working on in our classroom.

We finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the kids conjured up their own tasty treats! Take a look at some of these adorable sweets...

I love how you "whip" this one to change the flavor, AND how you can find it at Kroger.

How Clever is this!? Hottest thing in town....

They did such a great job and had so much fun. The class voted on which candy they believed should go to "production". The Salty Sour Wip won after a tie breaker and a convincing speech from its maker. 

In math news...

We have been plugging away at bar models for a couple of weeks. Tomorrow is our last day on this unit and I couldn't be happier. Math in Focus is great and it goes very well with the Common Core Math Standards, but BOY is it hard on the kiddos. They have some trouble with modeling. Our main focus as a school is problem solving. So many of them want to skip the modeling and go straight to the equation to solve. I am constantly telling them to back up and model. It will help them tons later in their math careers they are familiar with modeling. 

ANYWAY- mental math strategies are in the core. I personally think they are tricky to teach. Decomposing numbers seems to be the strategy of choice for a lot of my students. It's awesome...

Check out this work one of my students was doing today during our math block. Perfect bar model and decomposed number at the bottom... (insert happy dance here).

It won't be long until they are doing all of that decomposing in their little heads!