Going Strong in 2nd Grade: Math Tip Monday September: Number Sense {Even & Odd}

Monday, September 7, 2015

Math Tip Monday September: Number Sense {Even & Odd}

Hello Friends!
This morning I'm linking up with K's Classroom Kreations & Theresa's Teaching Tidbits for Math Tip Monday. This month, it is all about number sense and I'm excited to share with you a project we did last week to practice even and odd numbers!

Last week we moved from repeated addition and arrays into even and odd numbers. We have been doing skip counting since the beginning of school thanks to All Thing's Apple in 2nd's super awesome skip counting to a tune songs. My kids LOVE them. So far, we've learned up through the 6's.

Anyways - having my kids be able to easily skip count by 2's made the lesson go a little easier, because we knew, if the number came up in our song (only goes through 30) it would be an even number. Besides just learning that fact - we also drew a lot of pictures and made sure that each dot/square/shape had a partner.
When teaching even and odd, I like to tell my kids its like the shapes or pictures are doing the dosey doe and everyone has to have a partner to do the dosey doe. When someone is left out, they are "the odd man out". So, when we are working on our classwork in small group, we practice this circling the partners and I love hearing my kids say, "Oh, there's an odd man out - this number is odd!"
After two days of learning about odd and even - we were ready for a little project! My kids worked with a partner and I assigned them a series of numbers {0-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc through 99 since I had 10 groups that day}. They worked with their partner to create an Odd and Even Street with their numbers. Their numbers became the house numbers. I originally found this idea from The Teacher Wife, but wanted to do it on a little bit of a smaller scale, so it was a quick print and run to the copier before the kids walk in that morning since I came up with this idea at the last minute!

We talked about how when things are even, they are the same - so all of the houses on Even Street needed to look the same. But, when things are "odd" they are a little quirky and strange - so all of the houses on Odd Street are very colorful and different looking - some even sitting sideways! The kids followed my example pretty well, so we made a super long (too long for my wall space) Even and Odd Street outside of our classroom with numbers 1-99!

All of the even numbers went on top, and odd on the bottom. Students also had to put their house numbers in order, just like we would find house numbers on our streets that we live on. This way, our Even and Odd Streets look more realistic.

Students wrote their house numbers on the roof and then colored their houses. We watched this video on the first day of learning about even and odd - so when I made my example for the kids, I made some bushes with even and odd numbers, like in the video. You'll see above, some of my kiddos really followed my example and even did the same thing with numbered bushes!