Monday Made It: Math Stretches

Yay! It's Monday! Tara has made Mondays fun by hosting her awesome Monday Made It linky party. If you haven't seen it yet, there are tons of great ideas from the bloggy world:

As many of you know, I've also been participating in the Guided Math book study. This book, as well as a flipchart I found on Promethean Planet inspired me to create a Morning Math Stretch flipchart. I actually created it last summer when I read the book for the first time, but I've made some adjustments you'll see later in the post.

    

My Inspiration (You'll need to be logged in to Promethean Planet  to see).

My flipchart can be downloaded in a .zip format by clicking on this text or picture.

It is very interactive and includes all of the math stretches mentioned in the book:

• Number of the Day
• How my family used math last night
• ____ makes me think of....
• What's next?
• Data Collection

Now, for the changes. I tried to use this on my Promethean board last year, but with 26 4th graders it was very difficult and time consuming to let everyone have their turn with the pen. It was taking entirely too long to complete this quick activity, so I eventually put it aside. I tried to brainstorm a way that I could have the activity open on more than one computer at once, but allow the students' edits to be visible in real time (like with Google Docs). Unfortunately, that is not possible currently with ActivInspire, sooooooo I slightly modified the activities.

I created them in a PowerPoint format and uploaded it to Google Docs. You can get your copy here. It has lost some of it's interactivity by doing this, but it might save some of my sanity in the mornings! Students could access the document at different stations. Refreshing the page will show the edits students make. They can type answers into a text box or use the drawing tools. Did you know that if you choose "scribble" on the line tool, you can draw letters and numbers? And it auto corrects!

*Note: If you like it, please download it and upload into your own Google Docs, so that we're not all making edits on the same doc across the country. On the other hand...that might be a cool collaboration project if anyone is interested...?