Magical Product Swap

 

Over at Jessica Stanford's blog, she hosts a product swap every few months. I decided to join this time and LUCKY ME... I got matched up with Marcy at Saddle Up for Second Grade!  I was so excited to get her because she has some awesome stuff. She is also one of my TpT/blogger friends and was my niece's teacher in Texas!

After browsing through her TpT store, I settled on trying the Place Value Activity Pack: Hundred, Tens, and Ones. I already had her Pen Pals: Let's Make New Friends pack and just LOVE it. So, I knew this place value pack would be great too! Here's what the cover looks like...

This is actually a bundle of some of her individual place value activities. It includes I Spy Place Value, Mystery Numbers task cards, Place Value Memory, and my favorite - Place Value Slap Attack.

My class was so excited when I showed them that I had a bunch of new math centers. They LOVE math centers and these looked like so much fun! For this review, I'm going to focus on the Slap Attack game because I don't know if many of you are familiar with this game. I wasn't until I got this product.

Slap Attack consists of 20 cards with base-ten block models of numbers that look like this...

To play, you need 3 people. One will act as a referee. You start with the cards face-down. A player turns up one card and the first person to slap the card (not too hard!), gets to tell what number is shown. If the answer is correct, he or she gets to keep the card. If not, the other person gets a chance to answer and keep the card. The referee's job is to decide who slapped the card first. After going through all the cards, the player with the most wins.

My students LOVED this game! I was actually a little afraid of the slapping getting out of hand but they were really good with it. Having a referee definitely helps and they were all wanting to have that job. My camera wasn't cooperating but I was able to get a couple of decent pictures of my students playing.

 

 

These two girls played the game at least 5 or 6 times. As you can see in the pictures, they were turning over two cards at a time. After the few games, they decided to turn over two cards and slap the one with the largest number. Wow, what a great way to differentiate the game and they thought it up themselves! Some other things I really liked about this activity were the clear images of the blocks and the great size of the cards - not too small and not too big. Just right for second grade hands. You could also use these cards as flash cards to build quick recognition.

Since I was having camera issues, the rest of my pictures didn't turn out. But I'm planning to put all of the games out again next week. I'll be sure to get more pictures and add them to this post. I highly recommend a visit to Marcy's TpT store to check out this great Place Value Activity Pack (and many more awesome products). And don't forget to hop on over to her blog. You'll find a lot of super second grade stuff there (including a review of one of my products)!

Fun & Games

So, there are 35 days left of school. It sounds like so little, yet feels like oh so much. You know how those last few weeks just draaaaaag by. Today was a real test of my nerves and I had to pull out the dirty little trick of saying, "Hmm, I wonder how many of you will be ready to go to third grade in a few weeks." That snaps them to attention for at least a few minutes.

The next trick up my sleeve strategy to make the days go by a little faster is to find some new games and interactive things to do. I already use the Jeopardy review games on Mrs. Zirullo's website for our weekly reading skills (for Macmillan Treasures). But I just found this very promising site full of Jeopardy games for all kinds of skills. You can even make your own!  Now, my district has very kindly blocked this site as it falls into the banned category of games (God forbid!) but I've worked my way around that. It really is quite fabulous! Check it out...

The site has other exciting things too, like a random name generator for choosing students and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire games.

Tomorrow we'll be watching this very cheesy, but entertaining and informative, video explaining non-fiction text features... (ok, I can't figure out how to save the picture, but here's the link... http://vimeo.com/23765240)

Another fun freebie I found is Scootpad. It's online practice in reading and math (aligned to Common Core!) and you can sign up your whole class. They can work on it at school or home and get this... you can assign your own rewards for them to earn like lunch with the teacher or treasure box or whatever. Even better, the parents can do the same thing! One of my students is working to earn a new fish for her fish tank. Her dad added the reward to her account and when she gets 400 coin, she can trade them for a fish. Cool, huh?

So, what games and technological tricks do you have up your sleeve for the end of the year? I'd love some more good ideas!