New Ideas Linky Party~A Guest Blogger

Hello there! We have linked up with Primary Possibilities and are so excited to be guest bloggers on Chrissy’s blog today!

I’m Dina and I am one of the bloggers over at The REAL Teachers of Orange County. Yes, our blog has a similar name as a popular reality TV series, but we can assure you, there is absolutely no drama on our blog. We are just two elementary teachers that were formally college roommates. We have both been teaching for about 6 years. My friend and co-blog author teaches kindergarten special education and I am an intervention teacher and work with many different grade levels. For the past several years I taught third grade and I share many ideas for that grade level on our blog as well.  We like to share ideas for all grade levels, so come on over and say hello!

Today I am going to share how I introduced addition with regrouping to my second grade math intervention group.  Before I begin, I have to give major props to all of you second grade teachers out there. When I taught third grade, I just took it for granted that my students knew how to regroup! I now realize that this is a tough concept to teach!

Before teaching this concept, I first did what any resourceful teacher would do – I googled. I came across this site http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/themes/add_sub_unit.html, which had a great idea to use red and green columns when adding. This visual really helped my students remember where to begin when completing an addition problem.

Using this idea, I decided to make my own little version on the computer for the students to use. We first practiced the idea of regrouping using base ten blocks. The students knew that if the green box, or one’s column, and more than nine ones in it, then they had to regroup. We practiced this many, many times before I had them move on to addition with regrouping. 

I later put their regrouping chart in a page protector and had my students draw the base ten blocks with a dry erase marker. By this point they were very familiar with the concept of regrouping and it was so much easier to simply have them draw the manipulatives.

After they started to get the hang of it, they did this sorting activity with a partner where they had to decide whether they needed to regroup or not.

Here’s to hoping they remember how to regroup when we go back to school on Monday!

We will have the resources shown in this post for
free on our blog. 

You are welcome to stop by and download them!

What a great idea!!  Dina, thank you for guest blogging!  
:-)Chrissy