March BUILD

Hooray! I was actually able to get March BUILD stations out just in time for another snow day tomorrow!

Omgeeeee.

I’m over it.

I was planning my Thing One outfit for tomorrow and everything. The snow is just ruining everything! I will be so ready when Spring arrives. I am telling my pale white self now not to utter one word about the hot summer. It will be a welcome change from this mess.

Here are the stations that we started today!

BUILD follows the concept of:

B- Buddy Games

U- Using Manipulatives

I- Independent Reading (or Ipads)

L- Learning About Numbers

D- Doing Math

*If you want more information about BUILD as a structure for your math station time, click here to read my initial post.

So, here it goes.

One of the games they are playing for “B” is Shamrock Shake. I found these awesome erasers at Party City that I use as counters. They used them as the marker for their game board.

The idea of the game is to draw a card out of the bucket and solve the addition or subtraction problem. Whatever the answer is, they get to cover it on their board. The first person to cover their board wins. There are a few different boards so they could play the game as long as you want them to 🙂  I mixed the addition and subtraction facts, but you could separate them if you wanted to focus on one or the other.

Of course, I didn’t get a picture of the other game another group was playing but it’s called “Shamrock” and the goal of the game is to collect 10 cards without drawing a shamrock. When you draw the shamrock, you have to put all of the cards back in and start over again. This month, the skills are time and money.

For the “U’, I gave one group the option of either creating the pot of gold or the shamrock. Then, they had to record how many of each shape they used to build their picture.

Like I mentioned before, I had originally thought the erasers would just be counters but they turned out to have a dual purpose 🙂 For this activity, students draw a number and then build it in the ten frame and identify the tens and ones.

For each BUILD unit, I create my own little math books or have students use the iPads. I know I could have them read math books, but it does seem like this group needs a little more structure so I figured I would have them create their own books and build their own books.

For the first book (Lucky Numbers), students have the count the objects at the top. Then, they have to write the number word, write the number that comes before and after, and create their own addition problem that would equal that number.

Students love making these little mini-books. They looked at the two sets and created an addition problem. Then, they cut out the little pages and I had them order the sums from least to greatest and staple it to make a little book-let.

For the “L” tubs, I had students practice their base tens and use clips to identify coins.

The last part of BUILD is the “D”, which is “doing math”. This was tricky for my kids. They had the numbers but the addition/subtraction sign was missing. They had to make sense of the numbers to figure out what symbol should go in the problem to make it true.

Many of you have asked how many tubs I have and the answer to that is 10. I have 2-3 (3 is the most) kids in a group. They do one tub every day. I switch out the tubs every 10 days. The tubs 1-5 follow the BUILD pattern and then it starts over again for 6-10.

You can find all of these activities the March BUILD unit! It will be on sale through tomorrow 🙂