Friday, February 8, 2013

Snowman Number Representation

Early in December, Donna, of Math Coach's Corner, blogged about recreating a project to build number representation using a Christmas tree. I loved the idea, but we aren't allowed to do a lot with Christmas due to the very diverse group of students we have. So, I cornered one of our fabulous first grade teachers who I had been working with and asked if she wanted to be my guinea pig. Luckily for me, she said yes!

Our work began with having the students brainstorming ways they knew how to represent numbers. Once they got going, they were tough to stop! They'd see me in the hall in between our sessions together and yell new ideas out to me. As a result, their final anchor chart looked like this:

(The fabulous Teresa...I know the chart's a bit tough to read, but it's FULL!)

Our second session started with adding more to the chart...the ideas they were yelling at me down the hall...and then on to the introduction of the project in full. Each child began by choosing a number. It had to be between 20 and 99. After telling Teresa or I their number, they got their page of "Snowman Items". These were pulled together from Scrappin' Doodles, Create a Snowman. They immediately chose one of the hats and put their number on it. They then got started on their first representation. 





In all, the snowmen had between 5-8 different number representations on them when they finished. We forgot to add the cool ten frames presents the kids made and Teresa had to have the kiddos stick those on after we took the pictures. These came straight from Donna's great project.






The kids did a fantastic job with these! It was the perfect project right before break, and I'm thankful to have such willing teachers who take risks.