Ready to rock? Ready to ROLL…{dice roll}!

Hi, Friends! How are ya? The sun was out today and warmed things up a bit. I’m in a sharing mood, so I thought I’d stop by to show ya a little of what we’ve been up to in math.



Lots of our lessons start with doodled directions. Like many of you, we spent our Presidents’ Day at school. Well, most of us did. A number of my kiddos were out, so the rest of us spent the day reviewing skills in rowdy, fun ways! During math, we pulled out the dice and got ready to roll. We have a set that is blue and red; they're numbered 1-6 on one and 7-10 on the other.



Students worked together in pairs to roll, build, and compare numbers. Each student created a quick place value mat showing the position for a hundred, tens, and ones. We could have used a premade one, but I like to have my kids create and organize things like this to solidify learning. After we made our mats, students took to the floor {one of our favorite places to work} to roll dice, say the number, build it using base-10 blocks and use comparative language to describe what they’d built. Simple~Roll. Build. Compare. REPEAT. No writing involved; just lots of math talk and building a better sense of what those flats, longs, and units really mean.

Before all of the rockin’ and rollin’…we completed this little cutie to record our learning. It took us several lessons over the course of a week.

Do you fold and learn in your classroom? Here’s a peek inside….

Students used dice to roll and record numbers, represent them using drawings of base-10 blocks and make the jump to 10 more on an open number line. Dice were also used to record numbers and compare them using the symbols <,>, and =.

….and they really felt like big kids writing expanded notation for numbers to 120. Our state standards are changing. We used to only work with numbers to 99 in 1st grade, now we’re going to 120 and the kids are loving it. It’s been fun for us as teachers too because they're getting to see the pattern of numbers continuing beyond 100.

You can find this little set in my TPT shop…..JUST uploaded it! We had so much fun with this, I’m sure it will inspire a few more. Check it out! Get those dice out and get ready to roll!