Friends of Ten Bracelets - Bright Ideas!

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This month my Bright Idea is Friends of Ten bracelets. We have been talking about which numbers make ten in class and although we have been working a lot with ten frames, I thought we needed to see it a little differently.

You will need some pipe cleaners and some beads (here I had a jar of cut up straw which certainly worked fine!)

We sat in a big circle and talked about the Friends of Ten. Then I distributed bowls of straws and asked the kids to thread ten pieces onto their pipe cleaner (fine motor skills and maths unite!)

As we went through the Friends of Ten, we were able to separate the straws into two separate groups. Here you can see the friends of ten are 2 (on the left) and 8.

After we had had some fun moving the straws around, I handed out whietboards and textas and we recorded what we saw.

Of course sometimes we make mistakes, but having the concrete example there was easy to draw that students attention back to the friends of ten they had had a problem with and get them to remake it. Instant assessment!

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Organising Table Supplies - Another Bright Idea

I hope you are loving the Bright Ideas Linky hosted by Shelley Gray. It is such a fun and innovative idea to find a wealth of knowledge and information from REAL teachers using these REAL Bright Ideas in their classrooms. Make sure you click back to the linky to find over 100 more great Bright Ideas from teachers around the world!

My Bright Idea is all about how to organise those table essentials. In Kindergarten we supply everything for the students (and beg for donations of glue sticks along the way). Last year I had everything in cups and found that my kids must have been eating the supplies! Red pencils seemed to disappear into the ether but the purples were breeding. And don't get me started about the accidents....the pencil cups just always seemed to be on the edge of falling over (probably because of all the random pencils in there). AND the fights! I had a group of boys last year whose goal it was to have the most pencils in their cups. Did they want to use them all? No way, just collect them to be the winner.

I really wanted those cute caddies you see from Really Great Stuff or Oriental Trading but shipping to Australia is rather ridiculous. Enter the humble cutlery drainer from the $2 shop (you know, where you put your knife and fork to dry?)

Anyway this is what I started with

The baskets cost me $1.50 each and I bought 1 between 2 kids. I also bought new scissors this year for my class in 4 different colours and these colours are exclusive to each table. Each student gets a glue stick each.

Top view - there are 4 compartments. I use one side for coloured pencils and the other side holds glue in one section and scissors in the other.

See?

Pencils in the other side.

The finished basket.

Here they are on tables in the classroom. The kids have been fantastic and will let me know if they have too many of one colour pencil or there are no scissors  because someone has accidentally returned them to a different basket. Even pencils on the floor usually get returned to their rightful home as we can quickly see which basket is missing that colour.

Trust me...I am not an over-the-top-organised person, but for some reason this has really worked with me and I will definitely be doing it for years to come :)

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And for more Bright Ideas from over 130 bloggers, make sure you visit the link up below and find what you need!

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