First Grade Friend-Zee!: Tens and Leftovers Linky

Since spring break, we've been learning about making groups of ten and putting any leftovers in the ones place (a key Common Core State Standard). We have been spiraling this concept throughout the year during calendar with ten frames, straw bundles, and base ten blocks, so it's been pretty easy. Today as a fun team-building math activity I borrowed 3 inch plastic links from a fellow teaching friend and we went crazy with our own tens and ones "linky" party!

It's so easy, you can do it tomorrow!

I split the class into groups of 4 students, dumped a large pile of links in the middle and off they went! It was interesting to listen to some students talking naturally about numbers that add to 10 while they were building 10 and others have trouble with one-to-one correspondence when counting their links! Ahh...such is the life of a first grade teacher, dealing with such a wide range of skill levels. Some students understood immediately that if two students had chains with fewer than 10 links on it, they could combine the chains to make 10, while other students didn't think to combine shorter chains together and simply dumped both chains in a huge pile of "leftovers" just because there didn't happen to be any single links lying around. We had some really rich math talk and all in all it was a great math activity. Next week, in my independent math stations, students will have a chance to do it all over again with tiny links. Here are some photos of our "linky" party action!

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

The energy level was really high as the kiddos were busy counting tens of links, and of course they wanted to link ALL the chains together. Since I ~~would do almost anything to avoid inside recess~~ thought it would be a great way to practice estimation, we did it! We linked all the chains together and predicted where in our school the chain would reach from our doorway. SO FUN and a great ~~way too avoid the craziness of an inside recess~~ body/brain break!

Oh! And in case you forgot...

There's still time to register for the HUGE giveaway Nicole Rios is hosting! Even though her blog is for second grade, she's got awesome prize packages for grades K - 4. Click on the picture to get registered!