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Monday 13 June 2016

Teaching in the teens

Hi Ho folks!  We are currently enjoying the Queens Birthday long weekend here in Oz. I do think the old girl is just a little selfish having her birthday in our Winter but oh well I guess it is a good excuse to be on the couch with the heater on and some good movies :) thanks old duck!

But I digress, I really popped in to share our learning in our classroom.  The last couple of weeks we have been investigating the teen numbers.  We spent lots of time in term 1 looking at numbers to 10 and while I still have some littles that need to continue their explorations, the majority are ready to move onward and upward! Read on to the end to get a FREEBIE!

My main aim with the teen numbers was finding out if they knew that the one means one ten,so I asked them to explain what they thought the number 1 meant.  These are seriously some of the responses I got.

Student: It means number 1 is first.
Student: It means you can draw love hearts and go to a castle (ummm....what?!!!  but sure ok)
Student: It means a big number and a little number  (thought I was getting there with this one but he actually pointed to the 1 as being a little number)

So clearly we had lots of work to do.  We first looked at the number sequence to 20 on a hundreds board and they began to notice the patterns of adding ten more but still couldn't verbalise it.  Our next step was to make a teen number and then find the matching number on our snakes and ladders game outside. Still some students weren't matching numbers and amounts.  Hmmm, definitely needed more hands on investigations.

My next step was to make number chains, I gave each child ten strips of blue paper and then a number of yellow strips. I asked them to write 1-10 on the strips and then make it into a chain, then they counted on 11, 12, 13 etc until they had used all of their yellow strips.  This is where some of them started having their AHA! moment I had a number of them saying all teen numbers have ten and then some more.  We put the chains in order and this is when they could really see that all of their teen numbers had 10 in them.  We discussed that 10 has a 1 at the beginning and that teen numbers all have a 1 at the beginning, this was their next AHA! moment. This was the beginning of connecting that 1 to 1 ten.  Oh I love my job on these days :)

Our next lesson on teen numbers I gave out the number 10 written on blue card (see the connection?)  then a single digit number on yellow card.  I asked the students to draw the correct amount on each card but the 10 had to be drawn on the same side as the number 1 (left) and the single digit had to be drawn to the right of the number. Then I asked them to find a partner blue with yellow. Next we put the numbers together so that they look like the pics below



Love that this little went ahead and did ten but then realised that whoops!that  might be too many 



Now we are experts in our classroom on teen numbers.  I loved the idea of the cards so much I made a quick freebie for you :) just click on the pic below to get your copy.