What a crazy Friday night! Mental math is where the party is at!

So when I first started teaching, a Friday night would go something like this: come home, eat dinner, nap, go out, and sometimes stay out till the wee hours of the morning.  What am I doing on this crazy Friday night?  Catching up on soaps, blogging, and reading about mental math!  (It's okay if you call me a nerd.)

After taking a workshop on inquiry math at Purdue University Calumet, I bought some books to help me incorporate more inquiry and math talks into my classroom.  I did a lot of work with some of the books in one of my grad classes, but didn't get a chance to read them all as much as I would have liked.  Here are some of the books keeping me company tonight:

This book is an AMAZING resource that really helped last year's kiddos with number sense!  Short routines that are easy to incorporate into a busy schedule.

My new friend tonight.  As you can see, it has a DVD, so it's movie night!

This has routines for using 10 frames.  I am happy that Everyday Math has incorporated ten frames into their curriculum, but I'd still like to use them more!

Uh oh... while linking that last book up to you, I saw this...

40% off... dare I buy it?

Before I go lose myself in thought with these books, I have to share what I just read in Melissa Conklin's book about 10 frames.  She says to let the students drive the routines we focus on based on what they need, and to use certain routines over time, not every day.  I'm pretty good at the first one, but the 2nd part is where I need work.  Sometimes I want to see results so fast that I do the same thing every day... I also do it every day because if I skip a day, it's hard to get back into the routine.  Anyway, I'm going to try to incorporate some routines and mix them up so that it's not the same one every day.  Kinda weird since to me routine means repeating something over and over, but hey, if she says it's ok, less monotony for me!

Maybe I will post what I learn this weekend, though I've got a LONG list of projects I want to get done and a HUGE stack of papers to grade.  TTYL!