Whimsy Workshop Teaching: Quick Daily Math Ideas

All about daily math: Here are some quick and effective ideas!

I use my morning attendance to squeeze in a bit of math each day. While waiting for everyone to settle, students read the question and add their name to the graph. This accomplishes two things: I can immediately see who is absent, and a graph is created that is relevant to students because they have contributed their opinion.

Students soon become experts, and start to independently work out extension questions such as those below. When it's time to teach graphics and word problems, they are already well acquainted with it!

To practice quick addition and subtraction, we use our attendance again to make word problems:

*If we have 25 students in class, but 2 are absent, how many are present? Choose a strategy.

*If 23 students are here today, and 10 of them are girls, how many are boys? Guess, and then have boys stand up to check the answer.

We use a magnetic frog with a number line to check the answers.

Grab some sticky notes and cover any number on the 100's chart. It's easy to generate differentiated questions:

*Which number is covered?
*Add the two covered numbers together.
*Subtract one from the other.
*Use the class spinner to add or subtract with the number, depending on where the arrow lands. (See below).

Each students has a number assigned to them so we can line up in order with no fuss. We also use those numbers for math:

-Stand up if your number is even/odd.

-Arrange yourselves from largest number to smallest

-Arrange numbers counting by 2, 5 or 10

-Make groups of three that show equations such as 2+3=5 or number families, etc.

The possibilities are endless!

Finally, I also have lots of 10-minute math songs bookmarked on my Symbaloo board. Just find the one I need and click!

I hope you can use some of these ideas to squeeze in some extra math practice - even if you only have 10 minutes!

Next up on the blog hop is Lisen from 2nd Grade Smartypants. Lisen has an great post for

you about clip chart extensions! You can click on the button below, or check out the whole list of links below by searching the topics that interest you!