First to 50 (Fractions of Groups Game)

There's nothing like a parent-teacher conference to inspire new deceptively educational games. That was the case with this activity. My son's teacher mentioned that fractions of groups was on the lesson plan for the final trimester and that it can often be a struggle for kids.

Here's the little game I cooked up to help my son master this skill.

Not knowing how much he'd need to be challenged, I created one card game with three levels of difficulty. (Click on the level or the cards below to download a 3-page PDF of each.)

Level 1 is the easiest with a grid of squares, with the representative fraction of them filled in.

Level 2 provides the same visual cues (a grid of squares) that Level 1 provides, but the representative fraction of squares is NOT filled in.

Level 3 is the most challenging. There are no visual cues to help players. They must think through the problem in their heads.

How to Play

Playing is simple. Get some glass babbles (those flattened marbles from the craft store floral department) to use as a manipulative. One by one players take turns, turning over the cards in the deck (print 2-3 copies of the level of your choice or mix them together) and solve the problem. 

If the player answers correctly, they get to take the number of babbles in the answer. Colored cards have high-number answers.

But, wait, there are some "Put Back" cards in the deck!! If a player gets one of these cards, when they solve the problem, the answer is the number of babbles they must return to the "draw" pile of babbles. If they don't have enough, they just put back all that they have.

How to Win

The first player to get 50 babbles wins (or if you're having tons of fun, play until 100 like my son and I did). Encourage players to put their babbles in groups of ten to make counting them easier. 

Run-On Repair [a Grammar Activity]

My son has been known to forget end punctuation. Hence, the run-on sentence occurs. To give him a little grammar lesson on why run-ons are bad, I grabbed a roll of register tape and an Easy Reader Level 1 book.

I copied the words from the book onto the register tape omitting end punctuation and capital letters. I stuck with a fairly short book, as the text gets kind of long regardless.

When my son got home from school, I was ready with the register tape, scissors, pencil, and the stapler. Before he did our language arts activity, though, I pulled out a Grammar Tales book to help me explain just why run-ons are so troubling.

This is our third experience with a book from the series and The No-Good, Rotten, Run-On Sentence didn't disappoint. It's the story of Kevin Crabtree whose great idea for a story became the longest run-on sentence in the history of writing (okay, I might be exaggerating just a bit). The first sentence ran and ran, right off the page and all over town.

Finally, after many feeble attempts to catch the sentence, dear Miss Bartlebine comes to the rescue with her red pencil. The ridiculously long run-on was finally tamed into perfectly polite sentences with punctuation or by adding words like but, yet, for, because, or and.

Now it was time to apply what he'd learned. 

I handed him the run-on story I'd copied and reminded him that sentences contain both subjects and verbs and always have complete ideas (i.e. no fragments). 

He worked his way through reading the register tape, stopping to analyze where adding punctuation would make the most sense and capitalizing the first word of the new sentences. 

Snip! He cut the register tape into shorter sentences that we kept in order and stapled together when he was done.

This was a fair amount of reading since it often required rereading passages again and again until fixing the run-ons made sense. My son hung with it and when he was all done, I had him check his work by handing him the book from which I'd copied the text.

He did a GREAT job!

Quilt Square Fractions

This idea has been bumping around in my head for entirely too long. I'm thrilled to bring it to fruition. If you know a child that loves tangrams, this is the activity for them.

I made a paper quilt square and added some lines for guidance. Then I made several of the shapes that could fit inside, printed them on magnet paper, and cut them out.

I also made 0-9 magnets. Now it was time to "play."

I tacked the quilt square up on the refrigerator and told my son to fill in the quilt square to make a pattern. I reminded him that he could leave spaces empty so there would be white shapes in his quilt square.

Download this template and the shapes and numbers you need here.

When he was done, I asked him questions like, "how many of the triangles are pink?" and "how many of the shapes are squares?" To answer, he used the number magnets to make fractions.

I challenged him to reduce the fractions whenever possible (for example, 8/16 is the same as 1/2).

TIP: Make this game mobile (think road trip game). Buy a metal clipboard!

Personal note: An uber-sweet blog follower emailed to ask me about my health. I'm happy to report that I'm doing great. My breast cancer did not require chemo and I'm a few months out from radiation. So far, my body is adjusting well to the hormone-blocking meds to prevent recurrence.

Unfortunately, the PET CT scan which was done to check if the breast cancer had spread, also revealed a suspicious spot in my thyroid. While unrelated to the breast cancer, a biopsy confirmed papillary carcinoma in late January. I'm healed from the total thyroidectomy, and am on a low-iodine diet waiting for my body to be ready for radioactive iodine - hopefully in the next week or two. Afterwards, I'll go on synthetic thyroid hormone medication.

I'm fortunate that both cancers were stage 1. And more importantly, I'm blessed with an absolutely amazing support system and am glad that despite all the anxiety and doctor's appointments, I've been able to continue working with my sons (and blogging!!). Thanks for hanging in there with me through all this, followers!

Snacktastic Spelling Review

A pinner once commented that they loved my LEGO minifigure spelling activity but the prep was pretty extensive. She's right. That's not exactly the kind of activity you throw together five minutes before your kid gets off the bus with the spelling test looming the next day. However, this idea is precisely that kind of activity.

It's one of my quick, go-to, oops-we-haven't-practiced-spelling-yet-this-week kind of activities. Five-minute prep is something this mom appreciates. Not to mention that I can start chopping veggies for dinner while reading the words on the list to my son. (Sometimes multitasking is just as important as spelling tests!)

Quick Prep

Since my son often studies for spelling after school, there's usually a snack involved. But you can certainly do this activity without food. Grab a piece of paper with a grid (download some large-scale graph paper here). Write each of your child's spelling words in the empty grid, one right after the next so each immediately follows one another. Keep them from overlapping but have them wind around the page, starting in the upper left corner.

SPELLING WORDS IN ORDER: farmer, worker, mayor, television, electric.

Make sure the last letter of the last word is on the grid's perimeter. Write the name of a snack (e.g. string cheese) next to it. Write a few other snacks around the grid's edge in various places.

Fill in the empty boxes in the grid with other letters, being careful not to put any of the letters in the spelling words adjacent to the words.

Spell Away!

Now read the spelling list in the same order and have your child draw a line from one box to the next, spelling the words. 

When they reach the end, he/she will find out which snack they're having!

Animal Tracks Match-Up

Ever since the groundhog announced that Spring would come early, we've been seeing a lot more snowfall. While I'm beyond ready for our thaw to begin and temps to rise, I have to admit, there's something magical about animal tracks in a newly fallen snow.

Mostly we just have rabbit and dog tracks around here, but I thought it'd be fun to explore other types of animal footprints. I was hoping my own curiosity would be echoed by my oldest son; it was!

"What are you making, Mom?" he asked numerous times, cranning his neck to see my laptop when I was designing this animal tracks game.

Playing is easy. Simply print the four-page PDF and cut the cards on the first three pages out. Now scramble them and put them in front of a child.

(Download the Animal Track Match-Up game cards and Answer Sheet here.)

One by one, by son lined them up to match the animal with its correct tracks. "Did I get them right?" he asked.

"You have two wrong."

"Which two?" he inquired.

"You'll have to figure that out on your own," I replied.

He switched two cards and looked at me with questioning eyes.

"You have four wrong now."

The two cards were switched back and he went back to work trying to find the misplaced matches. In a matter of minutes he was ready with his "final answer."

I handed him the answer sheet and asked him to double check his work. They were all right!

We concluded our afterschool activity with a great book about the different types of footprints (and signs) animals make. My son had loads of fun with Arthur Dorros' book. 

Much of the story gives readers clues and pictures but doesn't reveal the animal that left the tracks until the page is turned. My son really had fun trying to guess which animal left what tracks. I'm so glad this book is part of our at-home library!

The fun doesn't have to stop here. Why not try the following extension ideas?
No. 1
Take the Animal Tracks "answer sheet" and go exploring for animal tracks with your kids!

No. 2
Have kids play memory with these cards, matching the correct animal with the right tracks (let them use the answer sheet if they aren't sure or print two of the answer sheet and cut out cards from that).