Do you daily question?

First let me tell you about my exciting life!! The highlight of my week...NO JOKE was going and getting a public library card today! HAHA!! I know I am sooo exciting! On to daily questions!

Do you ask your students a daily question? How do you do it? What kind of questions do you ask?

As part of the Math Investigations program at my school in Kansas, daily question was something we did EVERY day. My kiddos LOVED it...so here is how I did it at that school.

I asked them a lot of questions using environmental print. It took me a LONG time to build up my environmental print...I also asked parents to send in boxes and wrappers of what their student liked! Here I have Velcro taped to a cabinet.  Each morning when my students would enter they would get their picture (a 2.5 x 2.5 square with their name and picture on it) and go and READ the question. At first I would stand there and have them read it to me. Eventually they became responsible of holding each other accountable. I would change the wording at the top Do you like, Do you have, I like...etc. I loved how it helped them with so many skills, while making them feel incredibly successful! We started this the second week of school. They couldn't believe they could read on just the second week of school!


When I went to my new school in South Dakota I was introduced to something that would change my world! A SMARTBoard!! I don't know how you ever taught with out one! I know not everyone has one, and I think that is a shame! They are so amazing and can be used so many ways! So I took my daily question digital! I still used the same wording and used pictures. What I loved about it more was I could use ANY picture I wanted! I could make it go with our theme that we were learning about. For example...its hard to Velcro a dinosaur to our previous set up!

I also liked that I could do multiple answers. I could ask three different questions. 

I also liked being able to use the word or in the questions. 

Last year I also went into observe another teacher who is awesome (Shout out to Miss Dunker) and she also used a daily question. She then introduced a thesaurus to her class. They looked at different words for yes and no. I LOVED this idea! I can't wait to use it! Do you use a daily question in your class? How do you use it? I would love to hear about it!!

Have a great Thursday! 

Spider Math

I just love themed math ideas! So for the past few weeks we have been practicing counting. We have been working with dice and counting the dots. So when it was close to Halloween we added spiders to it! The 1st player rolls the die and counts the dots. Then they pick out that many spiders. Then the second player does the same, and so on. After all the spiders are gone the students count to see who has the most. I got the spiders at Wal-Mart...I think it was a package of 100 for $2.00!
Here are some pictures:

I also love these trays! They came with our math curriculum! They help everything stay in one place!

We also added recording our numbers. After they counted out the spiders the students recorded it on a piece of paper. They could make a mark, draw a circle, whatever was easy for them. It was just another way to show how many they spiders they had. Sometimes the numbers matched and sometimes they didn't. So that was a great discussion starter.