FROG STREET SPLASH!

It's hard to believe that Summer is half over already. It always seems to fly by for me.  I am gearing up for a fabulous and fun weekend in San Antonio for the Frog Street Press Annual Summer Splash conference (July 17-19), and I'd love for you to join me.  I will be doing a couple of Make and Take Sessions on Thursday afternoon, and then presenting a session on workstations on Friday.  Thursday afternoon we will be making some of the cutest Rekenreks you've ever seen, along with some other super cute games and such featuring some Frog Street Press western packets.  Friday will be a jam-packed session filled with ideas, tips, and tricks for managing math stations and reader's workshop. It's not too late to plan to come!  Hope to see you there!

REKENREKS!

Happy summer everyone!  I can't believe several things:

• that we got out of school on June 8th--how late is that??!!
• that two weeks of summer have already passed by so quickly
• before you know it, it will be time to think about going back!

With all this talk about the new TEKS (for those of us in Texas), and the Common Core standards for the rest of you, we need to explore "rekenreks."  What is a rekenrek, you might ask?  It is a math tool for young learners, similar to an abacus.  It was first developed in the Netherlands, but it has recently hit the US by storm.  We will be using them extensively in our district next year.  So, I wanted to get a head start on mine.  I made them a couple of months ago, and I started using them in my class with great results.  The kiddos loved using them, and since it was the end of the year, they knew just what to do with them to make different combinations of numbers by composing and decomposing.  I can't wait to start using them at the beginning of the school year with my new crop of kindergartners to see how their little minds are going to open up!  

I saw several different examples of rekenreks made by others in our district.  But, some of them were bulky, others looked hard to make, and some even looked expensive.  I decided to design my own, and I love how they turned out. Here are some pics:

The first pic is my teacher one.  I used black foam board, just to make mine look a little different from the kids'.  I used a nail to poke the holes, and I used a very thick yarn to keep the beads from sliding all around. (In one of the videos I watched, the teacher had to keep holding the beads down because they were sliding all around, and I didn't like that.)  The beads are 

1 1/2 inch beads that I got from Jo Ann.  I just spray painted them so they could be two different colors.  (A word of caution: Be careful when purchasing your beads--the first ones only had a hole on one end--they were more like a finial!) I just tied the yarn tightly to the back and then used packing tape to secure it further.  Then, I went around the edges with cute duct/duck tape, and I added another piece of yarn at the top so I could hang it on my board.

The next 3 pictures show the student ones.  They are roughly 4 inches by 11 inches.  It just so happened that the foam board I got had those ghost lines on the back, so once I did one, it was easy to count the squares so they were evenly spaced every time.  Again, I punched holes with a nail, and then I used pony beads and pipe cleaners.  I pulled them tightly and taped them down with clear packing tape and went around the edges with duct tape. They feel very sturdy, but time will tell.  Kindergartners can usually find a way to tear anything up that you have! 

I made a class set of these, plus a few extra, so I should be good to go in the fall.  

One more thing--I was at a training yesterday, and we talked about rekenreks a lot.  Did you know that there is even an app for that???  There is!  Just put "rekenrek" in your app search, and there it will be.  And what's even better is that it's a FREE app!  

Hope you have fun making your rekenreks!  Let me know if you have any questions about how I made mine.  I'd be happy to try to help.