Markers and Mason Jars

We have made it to the last day of superhero week: Wonder Woman! I felt it was necessary for a day to represent the ladies since every other day involved a male superhero, and my girls couldn't agree more. :) Today was definitely the HARDEST day, and many of my groups failed this mission. These problems involved multiple steps and some deep critical thinking. Although only a few of my groups completed the mission, I was so proud of all the hard work they put forth. The mission for this day was that Ares stole Wonder Woman's armor, so the students had to earn it back piece by piece by solving a word problem. Once all of the armor was won back, Wonder Woman had enough strength to defeat Ares! In order to receive a problem, the kids had to use their lasso and snatch a problem! The kids spread out all the problems and threw their lasso (which was a sticky hand) until they caught a problem. Then they solved that problem, and I was walking to check their work. If it was right, th...

Who is stronger...Hulk or the Abomination? The kiddos had to prove they were the stronger ones during today's challenge. If they could smash through all of their problems and solutions, they showed the Abomination their strength and defeated him! My class was split into three leveled groups for today's mission. On the floor around them were 20 cups that they had to smash through in order to find a world problem. They took turns smashing the cup with their Hulk hand and reading the problem to their team.   Then, as always, they talked strategy about how to solve each problem but then had to do the algorithms on their own. Once they thought they solved the problem, they sought approval from me. If it was correct, the student that smashed through to the problem also got to smash down the corresponding sum. If their sum was wrong, they went back to the problem and discussed other ways it could be solved. Talk about some intense math discussion and accountable talk!  ...

Today my students were off to the races to see who was the speediest Flash of all! This mission was all about fact fluency. All week my students have focused on tackling word problems, so I wanted to give them the opportunity to practice straight algorithms. I split my class into groups of three, and the goal was simple: to get to the end of the board game before any other team. Before we started, I had each team come up with a name that had something to do with speed... you can see we had lots of names involving "lightening" and "cheetahs." :) Each team was given a white board, and for every problem they had to switch who was the recorder. Everyone in the team could help out, but this eliminated any one person from doing all of the work. As soon as the problem was solved, everyone in the group had to raise their hand. The first team to answer the problem got to roll a dice and move that many spaces on the board. Sprinkled into the deck were challenge card...

The riddler placed a bomb somewhere in the city, and it was up to the students to figure out his riddle in order to stop him! The class was split into three groups to solve 15 addition word problems, and they were also given a cryptogram. Each problem corresponded with a letter, and once they solved it, they used that sum to place the letter(s) in the correct spot of the secret code. The students worked so hard to decipher the riddle that was left for them! Of course the riddler had more tricks up his sleeve than just a secret code. Two of the problems resulted in the same sum, but gave the kids the letter E and the letter I. The groups had to figure out that the letter I wasn't used and was only meant to distract them. This added another element of critical thinking, but all students were able to crack the code! The message read "Press the blue button to defuse the bomb." Up on the board was a red, green, and blue button. Once they solved the code, they got to come...