5th Grade Math Review Olympics

Our end of year state testing kind of snuck up on me this year and I wanted to come up with an easy and fun way for my students to review the math topics we had covered throughout the school year.

Enter, the Math Olympics MCAP Review! I created 10 "events" that the students needed to complete. Because all of my students work at different paces when it comes to math, I did not make this a race to see who could finish first. The goal was for ALL of my students to finish all 10 events during the two days that they had to complete the tasks. I allowed the students to work with a partner, but each student had to complete the task. As groups started to finish on the second day, I asked them to then go and help other groups that needed support with the events. Again, our goal was for ALL of the students to finish all 10 events.

Here is a description of each event:

Event #1 - Place Value
Place Value Sort

Event #2 - Expressions
This activity is from Laura Candler. Before making copies, I solved the last 3 expressions and made sure to make a mistake each time. (Order of Operations activity)

Event #3 - Multiplication
Page 12 of the PDF has the handout for this event. The students have to solve a multiplication problem using the area model.

Event #4 - Division
This activity is from Jennifer Findley. Visit the website here to get the activity. I chose one of the problems to use for this event.

Event #5 - Rounding
This activity is from Jennifer Findley. Visit the website here to get the activity.

Event #6 - Add or Subtract
Page 13 of the PDF has the handout for this event. The students read the two word problems and determine if they need to add or subtract, then solve the problem.

Event #7 - Fractions #1
This activity is from Jennifer Findley (Are you noticing a trend? She has amazing stuff!). Visit the website here to get the activity. I chose the Fraction Review page for this event and one of the dice that has different denominators on it.

Event #8 - Fractions #2
This activity is from Jennifer Findley. Visit the website here to get the activity. I copied a few of each activity and the students got to choose which one they wanted to solve.

Event #9 - Decimals
This activity is one that I purchased from Scholastic a while back, which means I am not able to share it on here. The concept is that there is a grocery cart with different items that could be bought. The items either cost a certain amount per pound or are on sale, for example, 3 for $5. The students have to answer questions about how much it would cost to buy 3 pounds of an item or for the sale item, how much it would cost for one of those items.

Event #10 - Volume
Page 14 of the PDF has the handout for this event. The students need to follow the directions to solve the two volume problems.

Click the image above or here for the PDF version of this activity that has the directions for each event.

Has it Really Been a Year?!

I haven't logged into this blog in quite awhile so today I decided to come back and check it out. My last post was from July 2018!? The absence can be explained in one word... this year has been a CHALLENGE.

I entered year number 9 excited for new things. I had been accepted into my administration internship and was going to be teaching 5th grade again (although with a little twist, instead of being self-contained all the teachers taught their own reading and social studies, then I taught my homeroom math, then we switched and I taught my partner teacher's homeroom math). It has been the weirdest set up I've ever seen.

So while I was adjusting to that schedule, I also found out about another twist. 3 weeks before we headed back to school, our principal was promoted to another job and we had another person take over as principal. This proved to be a very big challenge because not only was this new person a completely different type of leader (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but I was supposed to be doing my internship with my principal that was leaving. So now I had to ask this person that I didn't know, who was taking over a very large school 3 weeks before the teachers arrived back to work, if she would be my mentor. Luckily she said yes and I did learn a lot, but it was challenging at times because I was still learning about her as a person, principal, mentor, boss.

Now normally I don't complain about my classes because every class I have taught has had their own challenges, but this year has been by far the most challenging. As mentioned, this was year 9, I felt like I should know what I was doing, but this group of kids made me go back to the drawing board for almost everything. My classroom management that has worked for years, nope had to try something new. Tried the new excited ways to teach math learned last summer from the Mathematical Mindset books, didn't work. Went back to my old methods of teaching math, didn't work. I found I was having to reinvent how I taught almost every single thing. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was being done during a year where I was also trying to complete an internship and my mind and body were being stretched very thin.

As this school year wraps up I finally am feeling like my mind is catching up to my body. It is the end of May and I finally am no longer bringing work home to be graded from being so far behind. I am having fun teaching again and looking forward to completing year 9. I honestly have no idea what I am going to be doing next, but I do know that I am looking forward to year 10 and a whole new set of challenges because life would be boring if it was all easy!

Stay tuned for some new and exciting things I have tried in my classroom this year. I finally have the time and mind to get this blog back up and running.