Learning our Doubles Facts with ‘The Candy Corn Bandit’ and a WINNER

Sometimes I wish I was from Texas so I could get away with saying this but I’m going to anyway ~  Y’ALL we had such a GREAT day!!!!!   { It doesn’t sound quite right coming from a Cali girl who grew up in the Redondo Beach area. } Oh well… I planned a scavenger hunt for my firsties which was led by the Candy Corn Bandit.  With just a little planning I got our speech therapist, attendance cerk, librarian and lunch lady on board.  It was the best!  It all started with this:

I kinda forgot to mention that yesterday to get them excited I told them a bold faced lie or maybe just a little fib…I told them that Mr. Candy Corn Bandit guy came to my house and knocked on my door to talk about coming to visit our school.  You should have seen their chins drop.  I got questions like how tall was he?  Was he nice?  Did he look like an elf?  Did my kids play with him?  etc.  So you can imagine the dinner conversations that night at the dinner table right?  The parents are probably thinking I’m a nut job.  Oh well I love what I do!!!

Anywho after reading the note and singing the Doubles Rap we got ready for our scavenger hunt.  We grabbed our white boards and pens and read our first clue.  It wasn’t a cute rhymy ( is that even a word?!?! ) kind of clue it was just a simple math equation.

I had the equations and our friends we visited had the answers.  We wrote them on our boards before we got there and checked to see if we were right.

Our librarian didn’t mess around.  She wanted to be sure she had the right number of candy corns to match the answer she was assigned.  They all made a BIG deal about it saying they just turned their backs to answer the phone or something and all of a sudden they had a strange number and some candy corn on their desk.  The kids ATE it all up and hung on their every word.  It was the best!

His poster when we came back into the room was hanging up and there was candy scattered everywhere as well as new pencils and pumpkin erasers at their desks.  They were SOOOO excited!!

{ I found this directed draw idea from the very talented Courtney from: swimming into second }

Then of course to finish off our fun we did a directed draw of what we thought the candy corn looked like and wrote a narrative about our fun day!  Whew!!

P.S. I enlisted the help of some of my previous students ( 3rd graders ) to ‘decorate my room and leave presents’ while we were on our hunt. 

If you have been so good to read this whole thing I will now crown the winner of yesterdays blog post:

 Congrats to: Tania from My Second Sense!!!  I will email that to you shortly!!  You still have a few days why not try a visit from the Candy Corn Bandit in your room? :o)  I promise it won’t get crazy or anything! { insert evil laugh here }

 ** Just joined this link up with Teresa Wilson **from Confessions of a Teaching Junkie!

Link up and tell us about a lesson that went well for you recently.  :o)