Addition and Subtraction Board Game

At my school we have a special kind of parent-teacher conferences where we have "team meetings" with all of the parents.  We show them class data and teach them an activity that they practice and then bring home to their children.  When my first grade team met to decide what activity we could give the parents that the students would be excited about too, we decided on a board game.  Since we had already given the parents an activity to practice fact fluency to 10, we made this game to 20 (to meet CCSS).  After a quick search online, for something to use, I volunteered to create one.

We know that our students are not fluent in their facts to 20, so we included in our the directions that students may use manipulatives or paper and a pencil to help solve the equations.  If we are going to tell parents that, then we also need to show them that.  So, to go along with the game boards, I also created manipulative mats.

I like to teach my students the activities the parents will get at the meeting beforehand to get them excited about it.  Knowing the addition and subtraction to 20 games will be difficult, I also created versions to 5, 10 and 15 and introduced the lower boards first.  They absolutely LOVE them!!

I glued each level back-to-back (addition/subtraction) with construction paper in between and laminated them.  We used beans as counters because that is something that might be used at home when they play.  Click on the images above or here to see this product in my store.

Differentiated Scrambled Sentences

When I first discovered cut and paste scrambled sentence worksheets in Spanish a year or two ago I was in LOVE. I liked the idea of reinforcing the basics of sentences like starting with a capital letter, leaving spaces between each word and ending with a period. They could even label the simple pictures that went with the sentence! I started to design my own to go along with the integrated units we were working on like seasons and organisms. All of the worksheets had the same format. Students were expected to cut out words and organize them into a sentence that made sense. Then they wrote the sentence on the line below.

What became more and more of an obvious problem was that this was not really beneficial for the lower students. First of all, they struggled to even read the words. If they couldn't read them, how could I expect them to put them in a logical order? When I worked 1:1 or in a small group to help them complete the worksheets, they often had to be reminded that the sentence needed to start with a capital letter. It just didn't work.  My students needed the activity to be differentiated.

I started making three different versions of the same worksheet.  Version 1 is for my lowest students who are really struggling.  They simply have to cut the words and glue them in order to match the sentence that is already written (made with both a regular line and ruled lines).  This is more of just a matching.  Version 2 has the students copy the sentence that is already written.  This gives them practice with handwriting, leaving spaces, starting with a capital letter and ending with a period.  Version 3 is the original version where students have to cut the words and organize them into a sentence before gluing and then writing.  These have been working much better.  I am working on a 4th even higher version now that it is nearing the middle/end of the school year.  Here are some student examples of versions 2 and 3 from my students (from the Spending & Saving Money pack found here in Spanish).

My higher student chose to go above and beyond by labeling her picture as well.  She carried this over from the beginning of the year when we really practiced labeling everything.