Cabaret week is a wild time. It's hard for the kids to self regulate when there is almost nothing regular about what takes place in these 5 days. Between practicing in the classroom, trying on costumes, and having the school-wide dress rehearsal day, there is almost no time for instruction. Now don't get me wrong, this is a fun week!...it's just atypical.
However, on Thursday, we had a full day with nothing "ziggle zaggle" in it. This was excellent! I felt like we finally had a chance to breath a bit of normalcy back into our day. However, life sometimes gets in the way, and with a bunch of unforeseen things taking place along the way, things did get a little wonky. For instance, Mrs. O'Keefe suddenly wasn't able to be in our class at all on Thursday. This means that we weren't able to do math centers as I had originally planned. So, thinking on my feet, I decided that what was going to be our game center for that day would end up being a whole-class activity!
At the game center, the kiddos were going to have a packet of 48 subtraction problems (to complete over the course of several days), as well as 48 plastic Easter Eggs. Inside each egg was a problem from the worksheet. They would open the egg, find the problem in the packet, solve it, put the slip back in the egg, pass it to their neighbor, and repeat! We did this as a whole class, cycling through 16 eggs at a time. It was awesome! By the time we were on our 5th rotation, it was moving along like a well-oiled machine and the kids were zooming through their subtraction problems! Take a look at all the fun!
However, on Thursday, we had a full day with nothing "ziggle zaggle" in it. This was excellent! I felt like we finally had a chance to breath a bit of normalcy back into our day. However, life sometimes gets in the way, and with a bunch of unforeseen things taking place along the way, things did get a little wonky. For instance, Mrs. O'Keefe suddenly wasn't able to be in our class at all on Thursday. This means that we weren't able to do math centers as I had originally planned. So, thinking on my feet, I decided that what was going to be our game center for that day would end up being a whole-class activity!
At the game center, the kiddos were going to have a packet of 48 subtraction problems (to complete over the course of several days), as well as 48 plastic Easter Eggs. Inside each egg was a problem from the worksheet. They would open the egg, find the problem in the packet, solve it, put the slip back in the egg, pass it to their neighbor, and repeat! We did this as a whole class, cycling through 16 eggs at a time. It was awesome! By the time we were on our 5th rotation, it was moving along like a well-oiled machine and the kids were zooming through their subtraction problems! Take a look at all the fun!
This activity ended up taking us 3 days to complete! But let me tell you, it proved to be the PERFECT Cabaret week math activity. During that time, there are just weird pockets of time left for academics, and this was something that was easy to get out and clean up, leave in place to continue later, or put away and forget about altogether for a while. It was also pretty great because even though there was no formal subtraction lesson taking place for a little while, it gave us some extra practice with fact recall, and kept our problem solving and manipulative use from getting to rusty. So, as time consuming as this was, I think this activity is definitely a keeper!