math facts | Expect the Miraculous

Recently, on one of my favorite blogs, Free Technology for Teachers, Richard Byrne featured the app Fetch! Lunch Rush! for iPhone (also can be for iPad). I immediately downloaded it, played around with it, and loved it. I emailed all lower grade teachers to see if it might benefit their students with practicing some basic math facts, and the entire 1st grade team signed up to give it a try. I printed out the cards and posted them around the media center so that the game took on a true scavenger hunt feel. The basics of the game are that you have basic math facts that add or subtract up to 10. You have 10 printed cards with numbers and symbols on them to post around the room. The app gives you a fact, you find the answer, you point the iPad at the picture, a picture of sushi appears on your screen, and you tap it to send it to lunch. The app times how long it takes to answer the problems and increases in difficulty as accuracy and speed increase.

Students began on the carpet for a very brief demo of how the app worked. Some students were paired together on 1 iPad (up to 4 players can play on 1 device). Other students worked alone. It was amazing to watch how active the students were. They were scurrying about the media center looking for answers, pointing their iPads at the answer, tapping the augmented reality sushi, and moving on to the next problem. Along the way, students got problems that were challenging to them. The teacher and I gave them tangible objects to help them (fingers, popsicle sticks, markers, etc). They stopped on the floor or at tables to figure out the answer before moving to find the card on the wall. Students also began to get missing integer problems like 3 + ____ = 9. These were the most challenging for first graders, but the challenge didn’t stop them. They were eager to get an answer and continue the game.

This app pulled together so many great learning pieces for students. There was gaming, movement, problem solving, the cool factor, and technology. The teacher made observations and then went back to the classroom to practice more strategies that will help students develop their math fact fluency. I hope more apps like this one cross our path because it was fun, engaging, and took boring math fact practice to a whole new level!

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Our 5th grade and 1st grade buddies returned to the media center today for another round of media center collaboration on math standards. Now the 1st graders are working on fractions. The 5th graders worked with their own teacher ahead of time to view the 1st grade fraction standards and familiarize themselves with what was expected of 1st graders. Their teacher encouraged them to stretch the 1st graders thinking within reason.

Today, we started on the carpet in the media center. I used the document camera to display the book Fraction Action by Loreen Leedy. I only showed pieces of the book at a time because I paused and allowed the students to work with their buddies to draw representations of the various fractions from the book on the iPad. They used any of the drawing apps that were installed. Once they drew their representation, students closed iPads and we looked at the representations in the book before moving to another fraction. We looked at 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4 in the book.

Next, the groups split. Half of the students used a pizza fraction app on the iPads while the other half went to the computer lab and used several fraction websites that were compiled by the teachers. I stayed with the students on the iPads and had conversations with them about the fraction app. When they reached a point where they were getting bored with the app, we moved to other math apps to practice basic 1st grade math facts.