Five for Fraturday

What a crazy week! October in general has been busy with report cards, conferences, fall festival, and science fair quickly approaching. We've also started multiplication and timed tests on their facts which is very new for my third graders. Luckily this past week was loaded with fun stuff so we made it through :) So here's my 5 for Friday (or Fraturday rather) and my link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching! Check out their blog at http://doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/

First thing I want to chat about are our awesome tablets we got through a donors choose project. We were very fortunate to be funded for 3 Amazon Fire tablets and 2 iPad minis, bringing us to 9 total tablets in my classroom. This week was our first chance on them and with so many I could have each child in a small group on a tablet. The kiddos got to make tellagamis to explain math vocabulary, tweet about multiplication, and scan QR codes to self correct. They loved it!

We also used the tablets to research for their engineering projects! With the science fair quickly approaching my students were introduced to the engineering design process. What better time than the week of Halloween! Our first project was candy corn towers. I do not want to wish this project on my worst enemy... I saw the idea on Pinterest and candy corn is definitely not the ideal building material. But hey, it was perfect for the "improve and redesign" step of the design process LOL! The other project we engineered was a catapult. Now THOSE were a HIT! The "problem" they were facing was how to launch a candy corn pumpkin the farthest possible distance. We took time researching catapults and different designs with various materials. They planned their designs and put it into action. After each team launched their pumpkin we graphed the distances. 

Monday we'll do some math with the results finding the difference between first and last place and also the total distance from all 6 teams. It's been a blast!

Totally random note here, I saw this book from the Math Coaches Corner and I was so pumped about it I went right on over to Amazon and got it. "Building Mathematical Comorehension- Using Literacy Strategies to Make Meaning" by Laney Sammons.

I'm only on chapter 2 but I'm loving it so far. I'm noticing some of my students are having trouble visualizing the difference between addition and multiplication. We draw pictures to demonstrate the situation in the word problem but I'm looking forward to some fresh insight from this book and incorporating it in my lessons as we explore multiplication and division more. 

While working on word problems and multiplication techniques we are also starting to work on multiplication fluency and memorizing their times tables facts. We take a 1 minute timed test and when they pass they move onto the next fact. I've been thinking of a way to motivate students to move onto the next facts without doing a clip chart sort of thing that shows what children are behind. So in comes the multiplication monster! 

Each time they pass a fact they can add an eyeball, arm, antenna, tooth or spike to the monster with their name on it. They have love this! We can't wait to see our monster grow :) 

Last but not least it's Halloween! Us teachers have to have a little fun too and spook the kids hahaha. The kids have launched an investigation as to who is placing these creepy dolls in our classroom.