Open House Bulletin Boards: Learning is Sweet (Fraction Sundaes)

Last Friday my class made Fraction Sundaes.  By far, Fractions were the toughest math concept for my students to grasp this year.  In fact, for this project I had to simplify the directions even more than what Runde's Room had mentioned.  Ha ha - get it?  Simplify...

Basically, here are the steps I used:

1.  I gave my students the template from Runde.  I had printed one out and drew lines on the template before I copied it to add a name line, and 5 lines underneath.  Her template has the bowl and some ice cream scoops on it.  Some of my students saved the scoops to use as templates.  

2.  The students chose 4 ice cream flavors and wrote them on the lines 

underneath their names on the right hand side.  

3.  Then we came up with different ways to make 10, and they decided how many scoops of each type of ice cream to make - but it had to equal a total of 10 scoops.  These numbers went on the far left side of each ice cream line.

4.  Then we added our denominator /10 to each line to complete the fractions and had a discussion reminding them how to simplify the fractions.  They added the simplified fractions to each line (if possible).  On the very bottom line on the template we added "10 total scoops".

5.  Then it was craft time.  I had them glue their dishes to a blue half sheet of construction paper, and we cut out 2 triangles on each side to still make a dish shape.  Yes, there was a discussion how these triangles were right & scalene...  

6.  We cut out all 10 ice cream scoops using a basket of old construction paper.

7.  After all 10 of their scoops were cut, I had them glue them on from the bottom up.  We talked about putting the colors in the way they wanted them displayed - some wanted to make a pattern, some wanted a random assortment.  I told them to think a bowling pin pattern to glue the scoops down.    

4 scoops were glued to the bowl.

Then 3,

Then 2, 

Then 1.  

Then my students asked it they could add a little cherry on the top, so I cut out about 1 inch circles that some of them wanted to add.  

They turned out really nice.  I love the colors on the board.  :)

Have a great day! 

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Open House Bulletin Boards: Celebrating Science

Hi Everyone!  I hope you had a great day.  My day consisted of listening to 28 Who's Who Book Reports, sending 5 kids to the office due to allergies, creating our Zoo Maps, showing how to work a Super Magnet, and helping to count 600 test booklets and 300 scantrons.  That's only half the school - guess what I'll be doing tomorrow.  :/

Here is my Science bulletin board.  It's mainly all my Earth Day stuff that I've been telling you about for the past couple of weeks.  

Here are those cutie sea turtles.  

Here are our groups Earth Day posters - where we brainstormed ways to protect the Earth.  

Last, here are our "I am the Earth" poems.  

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Open House Bulletin Boards: Garden Theme

Hi everyone!  I hope you had a good day.  I've been busy in my classroom putting up all the odds and ends for the different projects.  I figure that I can probably share a bulletin board a day this week to let you see what we've been up to.  :)

Above is the first bulletin board you see when you walk into the classroom.  It was my writing board throughout the year - it's one of the larger ones... and it needed to be to fit all this stuff.  

At the bottom we made Factor Flowers.  This came from Little Lovely Leaders over at TPT.  The kids loved the project. These are tucked into the grass.  Speaking of the grass, my sons had to cut the grass this morning since it was so long when I was stapling the flowers up before school.

Then my class made these figurative language butterflies.  I mentioned this last week.  They actually tackled it on Thursday when I had a sub.  I'm happy how they came out.  

Today during math we finished up our sun.  Last year I made order of operation clocks, but I really don't have room this year for another big project - so instead each kid got a strip of yellow.  They created an equation that had to include parenthesis, multiplication, and either addition or subtraction.  After they turned it in they went on and made other equations that their neighbors had to solve.  

All of these projects have been graded by yours truly - an easy way to add some more grades for this time of year since right now we don't have that many more assessments left to go.  

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Five for Friday

This week we started to get ready for Open House.  Ours this year is on May 9th - so we still have some time to finish up projects, etc.  I'll show off how everything comes together next week.  I'm still in the process of grading everything before it gets stuck up on the bulletin boards.

Today I'm linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching to share 5 random projects my students created this week.

1.  We celebrated Earth Day on Monday.

Our Science bulletin board will include our group posters, our sea turtles,
and our "I am the Earth" poems.

2.  We created memory kites.

We brainstormed full class our most favorite moments so far in the year.  Then I had the kids take 9 of those memories and on a 3x3 table they drew pictures and wrote labels for them.  I had taken down the rectangle card stock that has been on our writing board and cut them into a 9 in. square (a great reuse purpose).  The kids chose one of the pieces of card stock for their background and glued the table on top.  Then I grabbed out some crepe paper streamers (from last year's paper mache project) and the students chose the color of their tails.

3.  Figurative Language Butterflies

One of my bulletin boards for Open House is going to be a park/garden theme, "We are blooming."  The butterflies will join other things on the bulletin board  The kids wrote examples on them in the different areas and then colored/cut them out.
This pattern is out of my Figurative Language Template Set.

4 & 5  I actually had time to create.  Yesterday I was home with my little boy, so I made up some Figurative Language Review Sheets and my Zoo Maps.

Figurative Language because I want my kids to have some more practice since according to them it was the hardest area on the test last week, and Zoo Maps because they need to review Perimeter and Area (and it makes a cute craft).  I'll show off the Zoo Maps next week after we complete them full class, I changed it up a bit from past years...

Now - If you would happen to like to get one of these new products for free, just leave a comment below letting me know which one you would like and your email.  I will email out to the first 4 followers to comment. :)

Hope you had a great day!

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