Play Dough Tens and Ones and Self Made Word Sorts

Teaching tens and ones to first graders is always a bit tricky! You will think they have it! Then you ask them to apply it in a different way and oh my...it's time to reteach. This year I have been trying to get in a lot of variations for all kinds of learners. I love play dough and the kids love play dough so away we go with play dough for tens and ones. I simply had the children to roll ten tiny balls of play dough and then mash the ten tiny balls together to make one. They did this in math centers. The children enjoyed the activity and it gave them a concrete representation of the singles transitioning into one. The next time we do this I am going to have them decompose it after they put roll it into one. They will be happy to see play dough in the math centers. Who knew learning could be this fun?

We love using word sorts in our class. This week I had the honeys fold their own papers for the word sort. They wrote the words on the paper themselves and then cut it apart. We were learning about -ed and -ing endings. They had a word bank to choose from for the words. After they cut their words apart they found a partner and played a memory game matching the -ed to the -ing endings of the same word. They switched partners a couple of times and they loved it. I was really proud of how well they worked together. We are going to do another self made sort this week with contractions.