CAMT

Yesterday was an exciting adventure presenting with my team at CAMT.  We met so many interesting teachers, I hope all the teachers got something from our presentation.  Pictures are better than me blabbing on and on. 
Here's my team - we presented at the Math-A-Rama session.  This session is geared toward elementary math teachers. 

Left to Right (me, Melinda Shinn (Math Intervention Teacher), and Reagan from Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits)
This is my second opportunity to present at CAMT, but previously our names never appeared in the program. So I was excited to see my name in print!

The focus of all the Math-A-Rama sessions is to provide hands-on activities focused on Numbers, Operations, and Quantitative Reasoning (each year the objective rotates - that was this years) for elementary teachers.  Our activity was called Place Value Is A Picnic. Our engage activity was to have two volunteers grab a handful of insects and come to the front.  Without speaking or counting, the volunteers determine who has more.  Then we asked for two more volunteers and we ordered the four amounts.  This is an exercise in subitizing.  Many teachers haven't heard of this new buzz word I only heard it last semester but now I feel super smart  To subitize is the latest buzz word that refers to a person's quickness in looking at a group of objects and knowing (without counting) the amount of items that is there.  We had our volunteers, one at a time, place their pile of insects under the document camera.  Our class would estimate by looking, then we ask the class how to organize the insects in such a way that they could easily see how many without counting.  We arranged them in a ten-frame.  We discussed the importance of subitizing and how that helps our students build number sense.  There is an ipad app that the kids love to play and it has three levels and various objects to work on this skill. 

Here's some pics of the game play

Then the door opens for a brief time...no counting

The door shuts quickly and the student has to select the correct answer in the lanterns

It's a great app ($0.99) and would be great in a center. 

This activity leads into our place value activity.  Next our teachers/students will have a stack of hotdogs with two numbers (we used 0-100) since Reagan created this for her class (1st grade).  Students will draw a hotdog from the stack.  They must build both numbers with base-ten blocks to prove their answers.  Then write with an expo marker the symbol (<, >, or =) and put them under the corresponding bottle (Katsup, Mustard, and Relish) I never know if it's Katsup or Catsup Here's some pics from the sessions

These were the big hit.  Folks loved that the kids can lock them together to make the regrouping unit. We didn't do any regrouping but they loved them anyway.

Then putting the hotdogs under the corresponding bottle

I didn't get a picture, but you can see the evaluate piece in the far right part of the above picture.  It is a sort and glue activity.  Like I said, this activity was created by Reagan, and can be found here.

We had a great time and met some friendly math teachers, I enjoy visiting with my fellow math nerds.  I enjoyed talking to few folks from far away spots in Texas, like my friends near Louisiana.  We gave away some prizes and had lots of fun.   

All this math has got me inspired to work on a class starter activity.  I'm going to attempt to work on my class starter and math journaling.  Hope this ADD won't get the best of me.!

Shannon