Reader & Writing Celebrations
Readers Theatre & Musical Shares
Mystery Unit Celebration
Confident Readers
Action in Voice
Performing for our Audience
Math Celebration
This is a shift from memorization of basic facts which usually refers to committing the results of operation to memory so that thinking through a computation is unnecessary, emphasis on recalling the answers. However, teacher facts for automaticity, in contrast, relies on THINKING. Thinking about the relationship among facts is critical.
Example:
A student who thinks of 9x6 as (10x6) - 6 produces the answer of 54 quickly, but thinking rather than memorization is the focus. The issue is not whether the facts should eventually be memorized but how this memorization should be achieved; by rote drill and practice OR by focussing on relationships. Relationships among basic facts in multiplication exist because of properties of multiplication (commutative, associative, distributive and identity) so this approach gets right to the heart of mathematics.
Writing Celebration: Trip Advisor
This allowed students to share with a new audience and multiple partners.
We shared popcorn afterward, before heading to specials.