Teacher Appreciation Giveaway, Math Mystery Messages in Action!

First off I’d like to thank everyone who has helped me out in proofreading my recent units! It really does help me a lot in knowing that the unit is going up for sale in its perfect condition. (Not to mention saving a lot of potential embarrassments =P) On this note, I decided to join this awesome HUGE teacher appreciation giveaway with Amy from Teaching In Blue Jeans (LOVE the name of her blog 🙂 and decided to give back to all the great teachers out there. SOOO many ideas and SOOOO many ways to incorporate FUN into learning. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come accross an idea and jotted it down for use and then when I’d be stuck, the idea will come to me suddenly because I’ve read it on a blog and seen pictures of it! 🙂

Anyway, onto some teaching stuff. Last week I prepared a pack to be used for tutoring. I created this pack over a year ago and thought I’d blog about how to use it. It’s quite confusing when you just see the title like this:

It makes you think: is it for word work? Is it for reading? Is it for math? What is it?? Haha. I got this idea while tutoring, I thought to myself, how could I make MATH more fun?? Children love riddles, quizzes and games and find that these things help keep them motivated and wanting to participate in the activity if there is some sort of element of competition or surprise in it.

Anyway, this pack implements a review of these standards:

–Counting & Cardinality: Numbers between, before and after within 20.

-Operations & Algebraic Thinking: Fluently add and subtract within 20.

-Counting & Cardinality: Know the count sequence.

-Operations & Algebraic Thinking: Solve addition and subtraction word problems.

-Counting & Cardinality: Count to answer to “how many” and the number of objects.

Will be adding more as the year progresses. 🙂

When you first open the document, you will see the standards and directions:

Then, if you had printed the whole document you will see the posters of a simple comic between two characters. I like to laminate these so that they can be re-used, although it’s really up to what you prefer. You could even print them in black and white and hand out a sheet to each pair of students. It starts with Mystery Message 1, then with the puzzles etc.

The students first read the poster in the groups they are assigned to. They try to have a go at guessing what the answer to the riddle is; you can even ask the class as a whole group to get the students more keen on finding out! This was especially fun! Once they are done, begin by explaining that each student will receive one recording sheet to color in their first mystery letter for puzzle A.

The recording sheet looks like this and 1 sheet is needed for each student for each puzzle, students can write their puzzle letter at the top. For instance, it’s the answer to puzzle A and my mystery letter is _____. Etc:

Here are what the puzzle pages look like:

Students solve each puzzle and collect their letters to find the answer to the riddle. The key answers are all given in the pack in color. Students can choose to use highlighters, colored pencils, or anything really to color in their boxes!

They can leave the puzzle on the side to help solve it, or you could also each group work on different puzzles, so each student gets to work on one puzzle and then have a team effort going!

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading through this post, If you’d like a sample freebie from this pack to try it out (you could play a mystery letter mini game with it), it’s right at this post on my blog, just click on the image below to grab it: