Five for Friday + a Freebie!

Happy Friday! Today I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday to share what we've been up to in my class this week.

This weekend, we officially had FALL at my house! Pumpkin carving for the hubs and I, and pumpkin-stick-in-the-Mickey-parts for our Little Apple. The Mickey pieces were perfect because little guy was able to participate right along with us without getting too close to the knives. I carved a Mickey because that's what he wanted... Hubs carved a traditional jack-o-lantern.

 

We started division this week by dividing up some candy corn for Halloween. 

I passed out a zip-lock bag of candy corn, a couple of napkins, and a couple of Halloween treat cups to each pair of students. Then, I put a number on the board and asked them to make equal groups using that number of candy corn pieces. (So for 42, they might make 6 groups of 7.) Once a group had a correct representation, I asked them if they could make a different number of groups. We did this over and over with different facts, writing all of the fact families we could make for each number into our math journals each time. Of course, the last time, I asked them to divide all of their candy corn evenly and snack away. This gave me a great chance to sneak in a mini-lesson on what remainders are too! The kiddos loved it, and it really helped cement their understanding of what we are actually doing when we divide.

Speaking of division, I gave a pretest on simple long division equations, and was surprised to learn that almost none of my students remembered anything about how to do long division from fourth grade. It's actually a blessing because last year, my class had a lot of exposure to it, thought they knew how to do it, but didn't. This way, I kind of get to start fresh!

I'm teaching them the partial quotient method (or the line method). If you want to learn more about it, and see a super embarrassing video I made last year, you can check out this post. I love that it focuses on the whole number rather than the usual "How many times can 4 go into 9?" that we all try so hard to avoid. To help  my friends learn this method, and to give them something to refer back to later on, I made a quick foldable for our notebooks. You can grab a FREE copy by clicking the image below! It doesn't include teacher notes, but if you watch the video in the other post, you'll know what to do.

I got to do a little crafting this week (finally!) So I'll be sharing details on a Monday Made It soon! Here's a sneak peek of "Project Menu Planning" - So far, it's going really well, so I can't wait to tell you about it!

Something special is coming to Teaching Trio soon! But you'll have to wait to find out what it is :) We are really excited though!