Making ten with pumpkin seeds

Look at me blogging twice in one week! AND it's a Monday. I deserve some sort of prize haha. We have been up to our ears in pumpkins in my room since last week. My students are always more engaged in learning when I have a specific theme for the week (or in this case weeks) but this year's class REALLY gets into our themes. It's so fun :)

I just wanted to share this cute little game we made to practice our making 10 facts. My kids are getting really good at this skill but we definitely still need practice so we assembled this game at school and then they will take it home to play with their families. I made an apple version of this game last year and it was a huge hit!

First we sponge painted some small paper plates and let them dry. I gave them each a full plate and a plate cut in half. It works much better if you can find the plates that have the raised rim.

(Quick side note: why is it so hard to find small paper plates these days?? Has anyone noticed that? The ONLY reason I had these was because a mom just HAPPENED to bring them in for me one morning after pulling "paper plates" off of our wishlist tree. I have been to Publix, Target, and Walmart and it always ends with me stomping out of the isle grumbling about how you can't buy a simple plate anymore and people staring at the strange lady having conversation with herself next to the cutlery. But seriously, what's with the lack of small, white, paper plates in stores? There are plenty of ones with the weird designs all over them but I can't paint on those! Am I the only one having this issue??)

Ok rant over. To make the pumpkins we painted the front of the full plate and the back of the half plate. That way when you staple them together it makes a nice little pocket for the seeds.

So after the plates were dry and stapled together, I gave the kids a sheet of seeds with numbers 0-10. They cut them out and glued the matches to 10 back to back.

To play the game, all the seeds go in the pocket and 1 player pulls out a seed. They look at the number and say the number that goes with that number to make 10. Then they check their answer on the back. If they were right, they can keep the seed. If they were wrong, they put the seed back in the pumpkin and the next player goes. Play continues until all the seeds are out. Easy peasy.

Click on the picture below to grab file with the seeds. I made a version with numbers and with ten frames depending on what you need. There's also an instruction sheet to send home so the kids can play with their parents.

Happy Monday friends!! 

Bats, Pumpkins, some freebies, and 1 tired teacher.

Why is it that short weeks sometimes feel way longer than regular weeks? I just finished a marathon day of parent teacher conferences (15 min conferences from 8am to 8pm with a few meal breaks in between). By about 6:30 I had parents walking in saying "wow you look tired"--always a great thing to hear ha!

This week was kind of a mish mash as we were finishing our bat unit and staring to learn about pumpkins -- two of my favorite units to teach. The kids just soak it all up and I love it.

Our ceiling is currently filled with our fact and opinion bats.

My kids did great with this. We used a sorting activity from this awesome bat unit by Kristen Smith at A Day in First Grade.

Then they wrote their own facts and opinions and glued them to the bats. (I don't have the patterns for the bat bodies because of course I left my jump drive at school, but you can get the fact & opinion page here)

We also started working with base ten this week. I made these mats with the numbers last year. This year I decided to add the grid for adding and subtracting 10 and 1. This is always such a hard concept so I wanted to make it very hands on this time around.

First we just played with building the number with the tens on one wing and the ones on the other.

After everyone was solid with building the numbers we moved on to using the whole mat. I had them pull a card and put it in the middle (funny fact: I made the cards last year, and without even thinking about measuring, I made the grid this year and it just so happened that the red cards fit PERFECTLY inside the grids haha. I love when things just work).

Anyway, I had them pull a red card and put it in the middle of the grid and then use the base ten blocks to model each step. So for adding one, they put another one on and wrote the number, then I kept telling them to always go back to the "red number" with their blocks before doing the next step.

 Obviously, this skill was still a work in progress when I took this pic ;)

This really helped them see the difference between adding and taking away 1 as compared to adding or subtracting 10. You can download the mats with the grids here and the number cards are in the original bat mat file here.

We finally started to talk about pumpkins yesterday. We've been working a lot on writing questions and statements so we made these little pumpkin patches to practice writing some questions AND activate our prior knowledge about pumpkins.

I'm such a sucker for these little "patches". I wrote a blog post on how to made the little pocket gardens here.  They just loved getting to move the pumpkins in and out of the patch when they were sharing their questions and pumpkin facts with each other.  You can grab the page for the pumpkins and labels here.

Finally we read Spookley The Square Pumpkin. Man I love this sweet little story.  I had them write the problem, the solution, and then think of what their own solution to the problem would have been if they were Spookley. Then they made a SUPER simple Spookley (literally no cutting or tracing involved, I just cut up a bunch of squares, stems and some eyes haha).  It's not the most creative craft in the world but I just adore some of the details in their drawings.

Her solution would have been to call for help--love the "illustration" hahaha.

And with that this tired teacher is ready to DROP. Time for some PJ's, my sofa and my trust Netflix account (Gilmore Girls here I come!!).  Have a great weekend friends!!