Odds & Evens

For whatever reason, my class has had a difficult time with odd and even numbers. So, I rolled up my invisible sleeves (it has been HOT here: ergo t-shirts) and got Pinning. I tried poems (which they loved), our colour coded number lines (hmmm), and cooperative games but there were still a large number of kids who were confused. I noticed a lot of teachers use the book Odd Todd and Even Steven, which looked great. No luck finding it in our school library :(  Argh!

As a last resort, I raided my own Stuart J Murphy read alouds. I bought several of his books from Book Closeouts, for a fraction of their list price, a few years ago. Cue dramatic music-I found a perfect book! Imagine that...in my very own collection. {head smack and sigh}

A little ironic to be reading it in capris and sandals, but the kids LOVED it. In a nutshell, it's about a farmer who is looking for his missing mitten. As he goes around the barnyard, he notices that many of the animals are also missing a mitten. The story goes through even and odd all the way up to ten. It is a predictable pattern book, both in the pictures and text. After discussing the book, I called up two kids and asked them to make a pair. Then did the same with three kids. Right away, the class wanted to make a group of three, but I explained that there can only be two in a pair. We did this all the way up to six kids, with the class deciding which numbers were odd and which even. We then made an anchor chart with the definition for odd and even. Which is at school on my blackboard. I forgot to take a picture of it on Friday. Basically, even numbers can be made into pairs with zero left over. Odd numbers can be made into pairs with one left over.

Next lesson, kids were given a sticky note with a number (1-21) on it. They had to show whether the number was odd or even using our anchor chart rule. I handed out the numbers so I could control who got which  one.

click the picture to get the page

I gave each child an enlarged sheet (11 x 17) and a sheet of mittens to decorate, cut out and use to model whether their number was odd or even. I got the mittens from Giving Up On a Clean House (wonderful blog) 

click the mittens to go to the page

...which I shrank on the photocopier so that I could include more on a page. This was a really fun, interactive lesson that incorporated lots of different ideas, inspirations and learning styles. We are making our Odds and Evens sheets into a class book for the kids to refer to as we have the numbers 1-21.

Whew! Hope this made sense.