Giraffe Math

Poster with fabric letters that I made.

Our baby giraffes

Our baby giraffes

 

The Giraffe Math came from the files in my noodle. I remember my first grade teacher using the growing giraffe idea for encouraging reading. Every time we read a book, we had to give her a summary and then she would reward us with a neck piece. On the neck piece, we would write the title and author, and then attach it to our giraffe in the hallway. I remember it being a definite motivator to get us reading as first graders, so I took the idea and tweaked it to use for our summer session.

Our students are going in to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades, and fellow teachers cited knowing facts as a wide-spread weakness for our students. Knowing this, I found fact family sheets for all facts in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and printed them off. I found all fact sheets HERE, except subtraction, which I made myself. I just checked the website, and they just added the subtraction sheets! This site is nice since they have different sheets for the same fact family. This would cut down on any temptation of looking at a neighbor's paper!

Every morning when we would meet our kids outside, we would have their packets ready with clipboards and pencils. They knew to take their packet and find a place to work. The kids could do as many sheets and fact families as they wanted. They would turn them in and we would check them and return them for corrections if needed. When they returned a perfect paper, we would give them a neck piece with the matching fact family written on it. They could then go to the hall to attach it to their giraffe.

This proved to be very successful as many students asked and lined up for fact sheets to take home and finish. The peer motivation worked perfectly as the younger students looked up to our older ones who were in a friendly competition to grow their giraffes. It was also fun to see the progress and the carry-over of their faster facts in our math session.

Look how tall we grew!