Adding up the fun with polar bears!

Happy Thursday!  I am so excited that today is the day my class will perform our play to raise money Polar Bears International.  I made this little invitation for our families and sent it in an email a few weeks ago.  It's made with Adobe Voice.  This app is so simple to use and can be used for so much.

As for our play, it's one of Heidi's AMAZING resources!  It's a play for primary aged children based on The Mitten.  Everyone of my littles has a part and each part is simple and fun.  In order to come and see our show, families will bring change to drop in polar bear buckets so we can Make a Change for the Polar Bears.  We also invited the campus to attend during the day, so we also supplied each classroom on my campus with a polar bear collection cup.
 

Here are some of our costumes:

  

We have also been learning about addition so we added some polar bears to the fun.  We learned there are three ways to solve addition number sentences:  draw a picture, use objects, or use a number line.  I made this little area in my room so students could freely choose the method that they preferred.

Click here to grab the posters for free in my little shop.

When we were learning about adding with number lines we used these polar pals.  I found them at Ikea years ago.  I hot glued a magnet to each polar bear on their paw and provided students with a polar bear, an ice plate that had "food", a number line, and a recording sheet.  Each "food" was folded in half and had a staple in it for the polar bear to be able to catch the food.

Students walked their polar bears to the ice plate and let them grab a food.  Then they recorded their addition number sentence on the recording sheet and walked their bear on the number line to solve the problem.  I wanted to see what would happen with 0+0= and this cutie wrote "nufen".  Ha ha!  So precious!

You can see one of my cuties using the number line by clicking here.

I have a few more addition ideas to post soon, but until then, wish us luck on our performance tonight!

Yippee for Randomness!

Hi friends!  My post is all over the place today.  It has been an exciting week! Here in Texas, grades 4 and 5 had the STAAR test - which means all of the other grades walk on pins and needles to stay quiet (which is so hard in Kindergarten, by the way).  Since it is so hard to stay quiet, we decided we would take a field trip to the dinosaur park.  It was a blast and we could be loud!

 

Field trips are also one of the few days that I pull out one of my favorite pairs of shoes.

 

 Yep, my bedazzled teal sneakers.  I have had teal as my classroom shirt color for several years now, so I about died when I found these on clearance a year ago.  My cuties think it's so funny when I wear them.

I also wanted to share how crazy proud I am of my cuties and their ability to add now.  Wow!  Who would've thought. I was pulling my hair out a week and a half ago thinking we would never get it.  We did do this quick little review today of addition using the giant ten frame I taped to the floor. 

My student teacher actually taught this review lesson.  She placed several "Easter" objects on the ten frame and then placed more "Easter" objects into the rest of the frame.  My kiddies wrote a number sentence to tell what we added together.  In the pic below is bunnies plus chicks.

 

 

 

Another bit of randomness is that my 31 Organizing Utility tote came in the mail, thanks to my new friend Katie!

 

Love, love, love!

Last bit of exciting randomness - I am taking the day off tomorrow!  Because I am a mentor teacher this semester to a student teacher, we get a free day off WITHOUT writing plans as a thank you.  Another mentor teacher is also taking her free day tomorrow and we are going to see Mirror, Mirror together.  Sprinkles to us! 

Happy Friday Eve!