Math Journal Sundays

Good Sunday Morning!!!  I want to start off by thanking all of you who entered my Blog Birthday Giveaway Celebration!  The comments you left on my post truly brightened my day.  I am so glad that you are finding ideas you can use in your classrooms.  That is the whole reason I started this blogging journey.  I used rafflecopter to choose my two winners and have already emailed them this morning.  You can see the winners here on the rafflecopter widget.

So ... on to another idea to share.  We're just finishing up our unit on prime and composite numbers, factors and multiples, and multiplication and division strategies.  I wanted to have our test on Monday, but I have one last lesson for the grade 6 students (order of operations).  I have a fabulous lesson to teach it, but I needed the weather to cooperate (this lesson is outside) and since it was raining ALL day on Friday, I decided to push the test to Tuesday and keep my fingers crossed for sun tomorrow.

Okay, this was a fun foldable we did for division strategies.  I can't take credit for the saying, "Does McDonald's Serve Burgers" - I found a fabulous poster on pinterest, and knew I liked it so much better than the "dad, mom, sister, brother" mnemonic device I had used before for steps for division.  HoJo's Teaching Adventures has created some fabulous posters using this mnemonic device.  You can check out her first post on it here.

I had the students create the burger foldable using 4 flaps (each word is its own flap).  We decided to colour them just for fun.  Underneath each flap is a sample division problem, with the particular step highlighted.  For example, under "does" there is a full division question and solution, and the division step is highlighted.  (I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of the inside of the flaps - I actually thought I had until I checked my memory card).  We added the steps, words to remember, sample solutions, and a definition to the page.

Part of our multiplication and division strategies is also multiplying and dividing with decimals.  (Sidenote - we've been doing this all throughout the year - not sure why it's this far back in the textbook.  Next year I'm scrapping the text book altogether [we barely use it all this year] and I'm making my own timeline for math). Anyhow, since we have been using decimals all year, I wanted this foldable to quick and easy - and act as a review for all operations with decimals.

We started out with a square piece of paper.  We folded each corner into the center, then folded each of those corners into the center again.  My class thought we were making a cootie catcher and got really excited.  ;)

On the outside of the foldable we drew a big decimal in the center, and wrote "Operations with Decimals" around the decimal.

Underneath the first flaps we wrote each operation.  Underneath each of those flaps we wrote a sentence about how to do the operation with decimals (in student-friendly language) and solved a question (highlighting where the decimal was in the question and solution).

My youngest daughter gets so excited when the delivery trucks pull up to my house (which happens far too often, according to my husband).  She watches from the window and yells, "Mom - the mail carrier brought you another present!".  LOVE it!  I ordered this "present" a few weeks ago, but I've had my eye on it for quite awhile!  It will be perfect for my math journals, and my plans for my language journals next year.  The book also comes with a CD of the templates for easy print out in the classroom!  YAY!  Looking forward to a few minutes of quiet time some time today so I can dive into it.

Happy Sunday!!!