Spiders, Graphing and a Freebie!

Yeeehhhhhaaaaaaa! It is Fall Break! That means 5 days of nonstop house cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and entertaining my own 4 kiddos. Wait....ummm can we go back to school please? I'm pretty sure that's less work!

Honestly though, I'm glad of the breather - a chance to get caught up and relax before the long haul to Christmas. I even left most of my work at school (and I'm going to mightily resist the temptation to go in this weekend!).  I did stay late to decorate my classroom tree to set the scene for my Colorful Spiders unit that we'll be doing the rest of the month:

 Yes, that is glow in the dark webbing....why yes, we might be doing some black light activities! The kids will be so thrilled with what's in store for them!

Poor Max got stuck in the web. That was my daughter's addition to the tree - I bet my kiddos will think it's hilarious! There are a few more spiders and webs adorning our classroom now, but I'll save those for another day when I share some of the cute learning activities and crafts we'll be doing!

I wanted to share a a little graphing freebie with you today. I do a lot of graphing with my kiddos - we do one pretty much every morning during calendar time. Sometimes we just sort our class in different ways - like favorite ice cream flavor, how many pets we have, hair color, shirt color etc, and then just fill out a graph on my big chart paper, but my kiddos really love doing my Roll & Graphs. It's hilarious because they will start rooting for a particular image and really get excited when it's "winning" (getting rolled the most times). I use these in my math work stations too, but I introduce the concept whole group during calendar time so everyone understands what to do.

Here's how I do it whole group: I always print out my cube on cardstock and tape it together (I have different sized images in my packs because I know some people have picture cubes that they want to insert the images into or want to print onto labels to make more durable wooden cubes etc but I love the cardstock cubes personally):

I use my Elmo to project the dice onto the Smartboard so the whole group can see and follow along. My kiddos all have their own dry erase boards (I use a timer to time us as we hand them out and then collect them afterwards, we can get all 26 handed out and everyone ready to go in under 2 minutes!) and they use them to work on when we're sitting at carpet. Here's a picture of them doing a dice addition activity - it's the same setup as we use when graphing:

One student comes up to roll the dice and then fill out the graph or write the addition problem on the board. Everyone else follows along - either by writing the addition sentence and solving it on their board, or by filling out their own graph with crayons.Once our graph is finished we discuss the More Than, Less Than page, and complete the Addition worksheet together as well.

Every time we do it the graph comes out differently. We just keep rolling until one image has been rolled 10 times. This means that we can use the laminated pages an unlimited number of times! Each time we do the addition page we use the numbers from the graph, so as the graph changes daily, so do our addition sentences!

Once we've gotten the hang of filling in the graph by rolling the dice I can move the Roll & Graph activity into work stations to be worked on in pairs or small groups or even independently. This means that for the rest of the year I have a ready made work station activity that the kiddos love that focuses on addition, graphing and number sense all in one! I just switch out the particular Roll & Graph for another that matches our theme or time of year. For instance, since we just got finished with our Apple unit this Apple Kids Roll & Graph will be retired to the Apple Unit tub until next year and a different one will take its place! Still the same skills, but my students are once again highly motivated because of the new images!

Here's a Color Bats Roll & Graph freebie for you! We're going to be throwing in some bats and owls in with our spiders, plus some of my little ones still need some color word reinforcement, so I decided to combine color words, bats and graphing all together in one activity! I hope your kiddos enjoy this activity as much as mine do! Just  click the picture to grab it for free in my TPT store!