Making Common Core Math Fun

One of the Common Core Math Standards is being able to count and add to 1,000.  This is a daunting task for seven and eight year old kids.  So, we did a whole group activity then broke up into small groups and then completed the activity individually.  Great learning and super fun.  First, as a whole group everyone drew as many stars as they could in two minutes on a piece of graph paper.  Next, they cut their starts apart.  Our goal was to count how many stars the whole class drew all together. They seemed overwhelmed at first. Then, we split up into small groups and glued stars together in groups of tens.  Then glued groups of hundreds.  The groups then glued them onto large papers and counted their stars.  Last, each child estimated how many stars there were altogether.  We added all of the stars together but counting ones first and making tens.  Then we added the tens to make hundreds. Last we counted the hundreds.  All together we made 1,050 stars.  Wowzers, we have some great Math brains in our class especially when they worked together.