Snowman Directed Drawing

I love to do directed drawings with my students!  They are always so proud of themselves and impressed with their art.  The end results are adorable and I love how different each one is.  I looked on pinterest to get some ideas on a winter directed draw and found this activity from Proud to be Primary with lots of examples and a step-by-step guide!

We traced our snowman with a permanent marker and used watercolor to paint them.  I drilled in the routine, "Water, Paint, Paper," so students would know how to use the watercolors.  Majority of my students have never painted!  It was a successful December art project and they look so great on our wall!

Number Talks

I love Number Talks!  We do a number talk everyday before our math lesson and it is an amazing way to build number sense.  It helps build those critical subitizing skills because students have to think quick.  It's a great routine that I learned at a district training.  The whole activity takes about 10 minutes and my students love it!

Students look at the ten frame to see how many counters they see.  Then we do a partner talk to discuss the different strategies they used, you know I love those partner talks!  I have students come up and tell the class their strategy and I draw the pattern and write the number sentence.