Teaching 5th graders is a challenge year round, whether right after a long summer break or any other time of the year. Both students and teachers are adjusting to new routines.
Yet, each day brings an opportunity for fresh starts and exciting ideas to explore, even though it can also appear daunting. From the planning stages to creating engaging activities and ensuring your students have a seamless classroom experience can be a real challenge.
To get fifth graders excited about math, it’s crucial to make your lessons engaging and easy to understand. One way to do that is to focus on developing a firm grasp of Common Core math concepts. This solid foundation helps students build the skills they need to solve complex math problems in the future.
You can help make the learning process more enjoyable by creating real-life scenarios that students can connect with, like word problems involving multiplication, rounding decimals, and multi-step equations. With these methods, students will gain confidence and learn to have fun while tackling math problems.
Find all this overwhelming? Fret not, math teachers, today we will discuss my top 3 grade 5 common core math activities that you can implement in your classroom and kick lesson planning topics like area of complex figures out of the window.
Here are the 3 best math activities I use in my classroom with my 5th grade students to make learning super fun and exciting.
1. Solve the Room Activities
If your elementary math students are not excited about math, you must try this math activity once in your class. Let’s face it. We are maths teachers, and we want our kids to solve maths more and more so they can develop the muscles needed to gain confidence. Especially during elementary years, when students are still nailing the basics, it’s more than ever essential to get their foundations solid.
One of my favorite math activities for elementary students is the Solve the Room math activities. The engaging activities turn the tedious task of solving math problems into an active and exciting activity. It creates movement and excitement for students while helping them build their math muscles to gain confidence in nailing the basics.
This is the reason why I use Solve the Room activity in my 5th grade math class throughout the year, especially during math assessment or end of year and just before the summer holidays. This activity makes the tedious task of solving math problems an active and exciting activity.
Solve the Room activity not only creates movement but also excitement for students. You can also use these to test students’ knowledge excitingly.
The activity can also be used as a center station activity, exit ticket, or an assessment to test what skills the students need to gain an understanding of.
Solve the Room activity is suitable for various 5th-grade math skills, such as solving fractions and decimals, or the perfect opportunity for students to practice the order of operation or solving the volume of a rectangular prism.
You can even make use of this activity to see your students having fun with solving math problems, which is a rare sight to have.
I have one in my TPT store if you want to try this math activity for free.
Benefits of using Solve The Room
First of all, you can use them as a center station activity. If you are one of those people who do not like their students to sit around and do their work instead of wanting them to be up and active, this is the perfect activity to try.
It gets them to wiggle out, leading them to behave better during the rest of the school time.
From a teacher’s side, you get to see your students having fun with solving math, which is a rare sight to have.
You can use it to practice any 5th-grade math skill, like solving fractions and decimals or order of operation to the volume of a rectangular prism.
You can even use them as exit tickets or assessments to know what skills your students need to gain an understanding of.
How does it work?
First of all, you need to set up the activity. It would be best if you had questions or task cards that your students will be working on.
Secondly, you need a recording sheet where they can show their work and write their answers.
After you have set the whole activity, now is the time to set up your room. Just place the question cards at different places inside your classroom and give each student a recording sheet to write their answers.
A recording sheet is just a piece of paper with numbers and boxes already drawn to make it easier for your students to record the correct answers to the question.
Students can use the back of the recording sheet to show their work if needed.
Students will move around the room, find the question card, solve the math problem written on the card, and record their answers on the recording sheet. They continue moving from one station to another until all the stations are solved.
So, to set up your own Solve the Room activity, here are the things you need to do:
- Print the question Flashcards to place in your classroom.
- Print the recording sheets for each student.
- Have your students walk around the room solving the questions.
- Recording the answers while you help them whenever they get stuck on a problem.
Although this activity is effortless to set up, it can be frustrating for some. So, if you don’t want to set up the activity yourself, I have a set in my TPT shop that you can purchase for your 5th grade math students.
The set includes addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions and decimal problems. It even contains multi-digit multiplication, division, and much more. I also have the same set in the seasonal themes if this keeps your kids engaged, so you can choose whatever you want for your classroom.
Want to check them out? [Click here to shop 5th grade Solve the Room]
2. Save the Queen – Maze Activity
What is this Save the Queen maze activity, and how does it work? So let me explain!
This activity is simply an exciting way I use maze activities inside my classroom. Instead of just letting my kiddos solve problems with maze worksheets, I try to incorporate stories inside them.
Here is how it works:
In the story, the Queen bee goes out into the wild and loses her way back home. Your students must work through the problems to return her to her hive.
The activity progresses inside a maze with a number written inside the honeycomb. The numbers represent the task card your student must solve to advance through the maze.
The student solves the problem on the task cards and looks for the answers to know which way to move next and what problem to work on. Each problem solved brings the bee closer to her home. A total of 10 to 12 problems are needed for the bee to be back home safely, which is a reasonable number for most kids to work on during one class sitting.
Not only this but kids are also awarded congratulatory cards to help them celebrate their achievements.
Want to try one with your class. Check them out here.
3. Color by Number Worksheets
Who does not love coloring? I know my kids do. Whenever I use any coloring activity with math problems, my whole class fills up with excitement and joy.
This is why I have one for every topic in my class. Honestly, most kids do not like to practice math, so this is my best bet to keep them engaged.
All you need to do is have a simple worksheet you want them to work on and give them a piece of extra paper to doodle on.
For every problem they solve, let them draw and color some fun stuff they want on paper. This keeps the creative juice flowing inside the brain and excitement running in your class.
Demystifying Multiplication Word Problems Using Color by Number
Multiplication word problems can often seem like daunting puzzles to young math learners. However, with the right approach, they can become an exciting avenue for our students to explore into the world of mathematics by offering insights into how math applies to our daily lives.
Understanding the Basics
The core concept our kids need to understand of multiplication word problems grade 5 is the concept of combining equal groups. Whether it’s calculating the total number of apples in several baskets or finding out the total cost of movie tickets for a group of friends, these problems help students visualize multiplication as more than just an abstract operation.
Strategies for Success
One effective strategy for tackling the problems is to look for keywords such as ‘total,’ ‘altogether,’ or ‘each.’ These words often indicate that multiplication is the required operation. Encouraging students to draw pictures or use physical objects can also help them better understand and visualize the problem at hand.
Real World Applications
What makes multiplication word problems truly fascinating is their relevance to real-life scenarios. From planning a party to budgeting for a family trip, the ability to solve these problems helps students to apply their math skills outside the classroom.
Practice Makes Perfect
To master multiplication word problems, practice is key. Engaging with a variety of problems helps students recognize patterns and develop confidence in their problem-solving abilities. Resources like multiplication word problems grade 5 PDF worksheets can provide a wealth of practice opportunities, catering to different interests and difficulty levels.
Multiplication word problems are more than just math exercises. They are key to critical thinking and real world math application. By accepting these challenges, young learners can develop a robust mathematical foundation, setting the stage for future success in more complex mathematical endeavors.
Using Division Word Problems in Grade 5
As fifth graders are starting to get some sense of complex mathematical concepts, they encounter the intriguing world of division word problems. These problems are more than just numbers; they’re stories that require insight, strategy, and a bit of imagination to solve. Division word problems in Grade 5 are not just about dividing large numbers but understanding the context in which division is used to find solutions to everyday puzzles.
Imagine you’re planning a birthday party and you have 100 balloons that need to be evenly distributed among 20 tables. How many balloons will each table get? This is a classic example of a division word problem that fifth graders might face. It’s not just about the calculation (which is 100 divided by 20), but also about understanding what the numbers represent and how to apply division in a real-life scenario.
Division word problems in Grade 5 often involve scenarios that students can relate to, such as sharing, organizing, and distributing equally. These problems help students understand the concept of division as an equitable distribution and increase their problem solving skills. They learn to interpret remainders within context, deciding whether to round up, distribute the remainder, or understand it as a leftover quantity.
To overcome these challenges, students need to practice regularly. Worksheets, online resources, and interactive games that use division word problems grade 5 PDF materials can be incredibly helpful. These resources provide a variety of problems that range from simple to complex, allowing students to gradually build their skills and confidence.
Encouraging a love for math through engaging word problems helps demystify division and transforms it from a daunting task into an exciting puzzle to be solved. As students navigate through these problems, they not only sharpen their mathematical skills but also develop critical thinking and decision-making abilities that will benefit them far in understanding multi step word problems and develop a better understanding.
But in my opinion, nothing beats a math coloring activity in my classroom. Coloring is relaxing for kids. This is why I have made these color by number worksheets to go along with every topic I teach in 5th grade, whether it’s addition and subtraction of fractions, mixed numbers, or decimals.
These 2 pagers’ fun color-by-number activity worksheets are exciting and self-checking. That makes them easy for you to grade and engaging for the kids to learn.
Every topic has a separate color by number picture template used instead of one single one so kids do not get bored by seeing the same stuff repeatedly. If you do not like to create or go through the hustle of creating one for your class, check out my TPT store.
Want to get some Color by Number activities? [Click here to check]
If you want to read some more teaching ideas, click here.
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