Monday Made It {August 10}

I really thought I was going to be better about Monday Made It than I was this summer. The creative juices didn't seem to come until the end of summer, which is a bummer.  At any rate, here I am today linking up with Tara from 4th Grade Frolics.

Our district adopted Eureka Math (Engage NY) this year.  We piloted Go Math last year, but obviously that didn't make the cut.  We were impressed with Eureka Math when we tried out a few lessons at the end of the year, but the prep work is no joke!  I've been working with one of my teammates off and on throughout the summer to get the templates copied and ready to go.  One of the things we needed were rekenreks.  We decided to whip up a set and have them ready to go.

Materials needed were: black pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, red beads, white beads and hot glue gun. 

We started by cutting the pipe cleaners in half.  Then we strung 5 white beads and 5 red beads on each pipe cleaner piece.  The next step was to wrap the ends of the pipe cleaners around the popsicle sticks.  We put 2 pipe cleaner pieces on each stick- this made 20 beads per rekenrek.  The beads didn't have a ton of room to move, but you could see the division between the 2 sets of beads, so we went with it.

In the picture above, you will see a pipe cleaner stick attached to 1 popsicle stick.  Another popsicle stick was attached to the other side by twisting the pipe cleaner around it.

The last step we did was to glue a popsicle stick over the top on one side to make them a little more stable.  It took 3 of us about 2 hours to create 65 of these.  We were working on a few other things in the meantime too (printing things and retrieving them mainly).  We are looking forward to using these in math this year!

I've made lots of baked goods too, but no photos.  Hopefully I'll be back next week with my classroom completed and ready to go.  We start next Monday (no kids yet though).