November 30th, 2023

Today, I was back at Cannon Elementary with Mrs. Donalson's 3rd grade class! They were also on multiplication and division but today they were focusing more on multiplication. I started the lesson the way I always do by doing a review on the board. One thing Mrs. Donaldson let me know was that they were working on doing partial mulitplication. For example, if the question was 56x8 they would do 50x8 and 6x8 then add those two number together to get their answer. So knowing that, that was what I did with them on the board to get their brains moving. 

Then we moved on the the bulk of the lesson. Todays lesson was a (fake) snowball toss relay race. I created mulitplication facts on index cards, both 1x1 digit and 2x1 digit. To start, I had them split into 2 groups and formed 2 lines. Then the person at the front of each line would run up, grab and index card, solve the problem and if they got it right, they would get a point and a chance to throw it in the bin. If they made it in the bin, they would get another point, if they didn't, they would not get a point. If they didn't get the question right, I would go over the problem with them to make sure they understood it then send them to the back of the line. After their turn, they go to the back of the line and this proccess repeats until the first person gets back to the front of the line. 

The first round the did 1x1 digit cards to warm up a little. They had so much fun with this. They were cheering on their classmates and trying to help them by saying, "Don't forget to add!!" Moving on to round 2, not only did we switch it up with 2x1 digit cards, they also wanted to do boys vs. girls which I fully supported. It was slightly uneven, with more girls than boys, but the boys picked out who was going to go twice and they were off! During round 2 there was tons of cheering, tons of support, and a little trash talk on both teams. It was so gratifying to see these kids work together and support their team. 

I loved doing this winter themed lesson with them! This will be my last lesson before finals and before winter break. This has been such an incredible experience for me and for the students. I love that I am being given these opportunities to work with these students and I cannot wait to see where this project takes me :)