 Welcome to the Ori County Schools Teacher Vlog series. In this series, we will be spotlighting the work of some of our amazing teachers, and they will be sharing and reflecting on various lessons, tech tools, and teaching strategies. Join us for a peek into their classrooms. Hi, Melody Lairmore here. I am a second grade teacher in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and I'm here today to talk to you about math toolkits. Why math toolkits? They are excellent tools to help children solve problems and they make abstract ideas more concrete. I started using math toolkits about my third year into teaching because I was tired of pulling out all these manipulatives, passing them out, collecting them, storing them, all this stuff. So I decided to make a toolkit with everything they need for each individual student. I use my math toolkits to enhance my math lesson and keep my students engaged. Students can use their math toolkits independently in a whole group setting or even in a small group setting. One of the reasons I started my math toolkits was because of our current curriculum in our county. We use the everyday math curriculum, which is a spiraling curriculum and everything spirals around and comes back. So a lot of the games that we play, we play them, we introduce them and then they come back and we play them several times throughout the year. Also, we start our math lessons with a math box page that has six questions of review questions that they can use their manipulatives to help them solve. Some examples of these questions are measuring line segments using a ruler, counting money using various coins and dollar bills and place value activities that you can use base 10 blocks with. There are also a lot of calculator activities and clock activities that this can be used for. All right, let's go see these toolkits in action. Come on. First of all, let me show you how we store these in our classroom. Here we have a student's desk. At the beginning of the year, I started off with command hooks. I put a command hook on each student's desk so that they could hang their bag on the side so it's always there for them. With humidity and we know that they cut off the air condition at night, the command hook started to fall off. So I found these magnets on Amazon and you can stick the magnet to the side of the desk and it hangs right on. So let's take a look at the contents of a math toolkit. And a lot of these manipulatives I've gathered over the years, most of them came with our current curriculum, which is everyday math, as I mentioned before. But I also added, as the years went on, some of my own. All right, let's start off with the basic deck of playing cards. We can do lots of games with playing cards and I think most of our math curriculum calls for a deck of cards that we play with. So what I do is I take out all the face cards before we get started. So each student only has the number cards and these can be used for various games like top it, subtraction topic, addition topic, place value, games. And then we have your basic 10 frame. In second grade, we like to include two 10 frames in our math toolkits so we can do the counting on strategies. We use our 10 frames for doubles, basic addition strategies like friends of 10s and we do also do friends of 20. So two of these, if you teach first grade which I did for about 10 years, you only need one. All right, the next thing, a calculator. Not too much I need to say about a calculator. I know in our curriculum that they require some activities that involve the calculator. We specifically have a game called beat the calculator where you have to basically beat the calculator. You add it up and you beat the calculator. So that's included in their tool kit. This is called a pattern block template and this was another thing that was included with our math curriculum. We use this to trace shapes when we talk about angles and sides and quadrilaterals and different things. And if you look closely, you also see it has an inches ruler and a centimeters ruler on it. Also, nice little tool to have. I like to include the tape measure in there as well so that they can measure bigger objects with them and it also has a inches side and a centimeters side. This is another fancy thing that was free because it was included in our math curriculum. All right, now for the fun stuff. I'm a big fan of donor's shoes and I did a lot of donor's shoes to get a lot of these math manipulatives throughout my career. And one of my favorite things that I got was this. This is a packet of money. It has bills and coins. So the students can use this while we're playing store in our classroom, working with money, buying things, learning decimals. All right, this I made myself. I've got the actual template off of teachers by teachers. It's the multiplication packs and we have all of them. My favorite thing about this is the ring that I got off of Amazon. It's a flexible ring. So it bends like that so the kids can't pinch their little fingers in it. But when we start using learning multiplication in second grade, they have something to refer to because multiplication scares them, the little ones. All right, everybody needs base 10 blocks. I know place value is a very difficult concept for students to grasp. And I've learned that having these helps them a lot. I use these for calendar in first grade to show how to borrow in subtraction when we're counting down our days. So these are so valuable. In the bag, I like to put about 20 longs and about 30 cubes because we do a lot of exchanging. Especially when we did the day count, we would exchange all the time our 10 cubes for a long and then our 10 longs for a flat. So each of them have their own little bag of that. And that also helps with addition and subtraction. Little mini Judy clocks. I got these off of Amazon. They were about 30 bucks for 25, which is, it's an investment, but you can use them year after year, which is what I do with all this stuff. Not only can they move their little hands for the time, but they can also write it with a dry erase marker on there and hold it up. So if we're doing a telling time activity, they can actually show me that they have the time. And last, but definitely not least, are my variety of dice. And we all know that there's tons of dice games for math that you can use. I have the regular six-sided dice. And usually I include two of these in their toolkits. This year I got fancy and I got a little crazy since we were out of school forever. And when we're out of school, I like to shop. So I bought these little dice in dice. So you can use these to do addition facts. And then later you can use them to do multiplication facts, but it's a little dice and a big dice. Love those. And these were about $20 for 72. I thought it was a good deal at the time. And then the multi-sided dice, they have two of these in their toolkits. And this is when we get to higher fact addition. You can roll it and we have more numbers to choose from to add. This is the contents of my math toolkits. If you guys have any ideas, drop it in the comments of what I can add next year. Thanks for watching an episode of our Ori County Schools Teacher Vlog series. Make sure to like, follow and subscribe to all of our dear Diss social media pages.