Kim Sutton Math!

Last Friday I left my kids in the capable hands of a TOC and went to see the always wonderful Kim Sutton. I was able to attend the workshop with my mom which made it even more fun! We arrived just on time (traffic) and had a great day of hands on learning!  One of the best things about the workshop is all the fun dice you play with! definitely know how kids feel about playing with dice when you see the fun colours!

The location was great, and there were a lot of people there. Here are some more shots of the day.

 all ready to go!

So of course this week we have been putting the things I learned into practice. 

We made counting strings on Tuesday:  They string 20-30 beads onto a string and then the beads can move along the string. It can be used for addition, subtraction and multiplication/skip counting.  It is also great for kids who need to fiddle with things. 

On Wednesday we played a few games with digit cards, and it was interesting to see who had number sense and who took a while to catch on to where the digits should be. The first game we played was with the random number CD that says the numbers 0-9 in a random order and they had to flip the cards over and back every time they heard it. When it was face down some forgot where the number was! Then we went over which digits were face up and which were face down. 

On Thursday we started with the flip over game and then added a twist where they had to flip over two digits that equalled the number called, so if the number called was 8 then they could flip over 2 and 6 or 5 and 3 or 1 and 7 etc. If they ran out of addends, then they had a rest time. You can play this game with partners and a double die (which we will do next week) and then if they run out of cards to flip over, they have to flip them all over. The winner is the one who can flip all their digit cards face down exactly. You can also add in that they can subtract or add the numbers together to get the number rolled.  The digit mats that they are playing on have dots and on the other side coins. When I had them put their digit cards down at first some were confused as the 5 spot only had one coin in it, but the coin was a nickel so we had a good discussion about why the 5 card would go there. 

The other game we played was with the hundreds chart and bingo chips. To start the random number CD that calls numbers 0-100 called numbers and they put the chips on that number. It was interesting to see who had a good number sense and who had trouble locating the number (a good reminder to me that we need to do this more often!!) Then they had to get 4 numbers in a row. After the random number CD (which one student figured out everyone would get a four in a row at the same time if they are listening) they rolled a double decagon die (10 sided, I am trying to use more math language) and covered that number( the outside number was the tens place and the inside die was the units place). When they got 4 in a row, they wrote down a tally mark and once they got 10 tally marks they won. Now we don't have 100 bingo chips each so the kicker was that once they ran out of chips, they could start moving the ones on the board to another location if they felt it would benefit their game. This was a hard concept for them to contend with.