Okay, so this isn’t really spooky. I teach 7 year olds! I have to keep it clean, engaging, and nothing that can be associated with any kind of religious shenanigans. Because that would be bad. Real bad.
I noticed many, many of our second grade students were struggling with fact families. We had to stop everything and back the bus up and realllly work on this before we moved on to anything more difficult.
I came up with this idea during lunch about 20 minutes before the kids came in. We rushed to get it together and the kids loved it!
We made haunted fact family houses!
We gave the kids an index card with three numbers. We made the index cards ahead of time and were able to differentiate the difficulty of the task by how large the numbers were. And best of all? The kids had no idea that task was leveled.
The kids were then able to pick out two pumpkins to write the subtraction sentence on and two spider webs to write the addition sentences on.
They were cute, but I decided to make them MUCH cuter than my “on the fly” activity. I created a template to share with several pages. Here is the house.
Make a few copies on cards stock and cut them out. Students can use them as tracers and choose their own color of construction paper for the house.
Students write the fact family numbers on the door.
I then included a few other pages you (or the students) can use for the number sentences. There are several doors on one page to save paper!
Students can then write the number sentences on the bats, pumpkins or windows. Or they can write them on the windows and use the pumpkins and bats as decoration. I hand drew the pumpkins and bats in Photoshop because I couldn’t find simple enough clip art. They aren’t perfect, but it was my first go!
If you would like a copy of this file you can download it here,
free!
Enjoy!
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Mandy Gregory is a 2007 and 2012 Teacher of the Year. She has taught Kindergarten- 4th grades in both the general education and inclusion settings. She is currently a 1st grade Special Education teacher. She is the owner and creator of Mandy’s Tips for Teachers website (www.mandystipsforteachers.com) and has over 13 years of teaching experience. She is married with two beautiful children.
Hi Mandy. Thanks for sharing. I thought I'd let you know how I'm going to extend your cool idea. I am printing the bats and will have my first graders choose some to glue in a cave and some for out of a cave. Then they will write a fact family story. Example: There are 14 bats. # are in the cave and 11 are out of the cave 3+11=14. Thanks for inspiring me!
Thanks so much for this. My homeschooler and I are going to have some Halloween fun!!