Struggling to get it all in?

If you are like me, you struggle to get everything in that you need to teach in a day. There's always something that seems to get pushed to the aside to do "later." For me, it usually has to do with math -- not my favorite subject to teach, and we are only scheduled for math for 40 minutes a day, although I do have some flexibility within my schedule, sometime stretching it to 50 minutes or an hour if necessary.

With the focus on math strategies in our math book, it feels like automaticity of the basic facts gets left behind.  This really bothers me because I know how important it is for children to know their basic facts at a glance.

I've tried various ways to incorporate mastery, but they have fallen short, until this year, when I created this nifty little addition game, available in PPT or Google™ Slides.

As you can see, this is a great tool to use during transition times or down times in the classroom, as we come back from using the restroom in dribs and drabs or coming back from lunch.  You can also use it as math game for the whole group or in a center.  But best of all, once I started using this in my classroom daily, I saw less and less finger counting and number line counting and more and more automaticity of the basic facts in my classroom.

Once the children had started memorizing these addition facts, it was easier for them to understand the relationship between addition and subtraction facts and recognize how fact families worked. I'm really excited to use it earlier in the year this upcoming school year!

If you signed up for my newsletter, you could get the PowerPoint version of this game absolutely free!  If not, you can find the Google™ Slides version bundled with PPT version in my TpT store.  You can sign up for my newsletter by visiting my Facebook page and hitting the sign up button. Just click on my logo below to take you there!