I am so over our math program! It’s soooooo boring! And if I’m bored, the kids are too. So today we did ‘Cootie Catcher Math’ aka ‘Fortune Teller Math’. This was not completely my idea. The original paper came from Scholastic. I liked it, copied it, and added to it. So simple, so fun, so NOT boring!
I copied the Cootie Catcher from a book by Scholastic. This was interesting because my students aren’t really into them at the moment so neither of us knew how to fold them properly. After a brief refresher, we were on our way! This was a very simplistic one. We needed to practice subtracting fractions. This one had like denominators so it was perfect for the first go-around.
The students worked in pairs. They had 2 tasks to complete for each round. Round one had them answering a subtraction problem while round two had them answering a more difficult word problem. But, because I know how 5th-graders work, there had to be some accountability attached otherwise it would be a free for all.
Students were tasked with solving all problems on their whiteboards. Then they were to take a photo and insert it into a slideshow that I shared with them via Google Classroom. Essentially, the students had a 2 slides presentation to complete. Problem 1 and challenge went on one slide show while problem 2 and the attached challenge went on slide two.
It was a success! All students completed the task successfully. I plan to do it again! I’m feeling better and better about math as I stretch what can be done outside a textbook. Last week we did an Iron Chef, Math Style.
Nowa Techie 