Hello!  Radio silence, anyone?  It can only mean one thing… back to school!  We began last week, and it has been go, go, go ever since.  I wanted to stop in and share a few of the fun back to school math things we did on the first days of school.  We have already had an excellent time!

Ten Math Rules

I have been so inspired by some of the things I have found on Pinterest that the way I begin my year has totally changed.  We started out with our version of the 10 Commandments of Math.  We couldn’t use the commandments theme, and we couldn’t use anything that might sound like it related to the commandments, so I had to tweak mine a little bit.  I loved the novelty of how it was written, so I decided to do “Thine Majesty’s Royal Math Rules.”  My kids got such a kick out of this!  They each got a copy for their math journals, and we now have this poster hanging in our room as well.

My husband helped me enlarge the template!

Want a copy of my tweaked version?  Click here to download it for free!  

ABCs of Arithmetic

Next, we started on our first fun little activity, the ABCs of Arithmetic.  I was inspired by Little Lovely Leaders and her adorable ABC Math Word Wall (it’s FREE and SO cute!) as well as the novel project we did last year.  I was curious what my students would think of–I have the same group this year as I did last year, so I was excited to see what they remembered, too!  They had a lot of fun with this activity, and I was so impressed with some of the words they came up with. You can download the template I used for free HERE.

Calendar Task Cards

Finally, we worked on my School Calendar Task Cards.  At the END of last year, I realized the students had no idea how to read our school year calendar, so I created these to use at the beginning of the year so that they could take some time to figure it out.  Real life math skills!

I gave each group of students a few cards to figure out and then share.  The students really loved this–most said they saw the calendars hanging up in their houses somewhere but didn’t have a clue how to read it.  We had so much fun, and this is going to be a yearly staple in my room!

It has been a great first few days, and I can’t wait to get into the “good stuff” with the kids soon! In the meantime, here is how I have been de-stressing. Love me some FroYo!