September 13th, 2024

I'm back!!! After a very long and restful summer, I am back with my lessons. We are starting off the year at Heretige Elementary School with Mrs. Ray's 4th grade class. I did some lessons with her kiddos last year so I was so so so excited to come back and teach her new students. Today, they were working on decimal comparison. I actually reached out to my own 4th grade teacher to get some ideas from her, which was very helpful! 

Like always, I started my lesson on the board. I did a little warm-up with some decimal comparison questions just to get their brains thinking. We then moved on to the next part of my lesson which was a game of war. This was an idea that my 4th grade teacher suggested. So what I did was I took a giant stack on index cards and I wrote different decimal number on them. I had the students split up into pairs and I did my best to evenluy divide the cards. I went over the rules of war and then they were off! They loved this little friendly competition. It was so cool to see how their brains we comparing the decimals at such a fast pace. They played a few rounds of the game before we moved on to the next part. At the end we did it tournament style and had an ultimate decimal winner!

Moving on to the next part of the lesson, I had them move back to their desks. I created a decimal comaprison worksheet with a bunch of blanks on it that they had to fill in with the role of a die. If you click here you can see the instructions for this worksheet! The goal was to compare all thier decimals and look at the conditions sheet to determine what they would put on their ice cream cone that I made for them. The students did such a great job with this. They loved the fact that their ice cream cone was different than their partners. I loved getting to see them use their comparsion strategies to work on this activity. After they were all done, I had them do a little show and tell and use their math language saying things like, "I had chocolate sauce on mine because 3.75 is greater than 2.48." 

I loved getting to start of the year back at HES with Mrs. Ray's students. They did a wonderful job with this activity and I know there are so many more to come! I can't wait to continue this project and see how it grows!