Has the year been flying by for anyone else? I feel like I just blinked and we are already at the 7th week of school!
Our school is doing a book study on the book called Making Differentiation a Habit by Diane Heacox. It really is an easy read with lots of practical ideas. I don’t mind reading the theory behind things sometimes, but I really appreciate when books like this one give you plenty of ideas that you can implement right away.
Anyway, after reading the first 3 chapters I was inspired to think about my kiddos who would get rounding really quickly. They had never been taught how to round before, but I knew that there would be a handful after a mini-lesson or two who would already get it and be ready for a challenge. So, I created a little test (very short, but covered the things they needed to know) for those that wanted to try and test out of the rest of the rounding lessons. If they did it all correctly without any help, they could work on our MacBooks on the ToysRUs project.
I created a project (inspired by something the 4th graders at our school were doing with Carmax.com) where students were to imagine that an 8 year-old was coming to a new family in the US and had no toys yet. They were supposed to figure out what the parents should buy within their budget and use rounding to come up with the total cost and a calculator to compare the rounded total with the actual total.
My students who did the project really enjoyed it. They wanted to work on it any chance they had.
You can download it for free here!
I plan on making more of these projects to go along with addition/subtraction, geometry and other units we cover in math. My kids keep asking if they will have another chance to work on an extension project.
I’ll be sure and post the rest here and on TPT. If you don’t check blogger often, you may want to follow my TPT store to stay updated!
For my students that didn’t test out of rounding, I was able to spend time with them as a smaller group working on the areas they were still confused about.
One of the games they still ask to play is my Robot Rounding Bump. It comes with 4 different game boards and is only $2.50.
Have a great weekend!
