MathThis week we continued to work with number stories and number lines. Children make a natural progression from counting to basic addition - but there's a key moment along the way. It comes when they realise they don't have to count all the way from one each time. Using the example of 3+4, children start out by counting on fingers from one to three, then they count four more to get seven. There's nothing wrong with this method - it's a natural stage - but there's a bit of needless counting going on. Soon they'll realise this and start at three and the count on to seven. Number lines are a great way to accelerate this development. Number lines provide a mental strategy for addition and subtraction. It's easy to think of them as a kind of crutch for the struggling, but not so, research has shown they're important because they promote good mental arithmetic strategies. Learners soon graduate from using simple number lines to visualizing one in their mind - this is when the humble number line has done its job! This week I posed the following tasks and had volunteers hop on the large number line on the floor while the rest of the children followed along using their own number line. We had children note the starting number, how many hops were taken, and the ending number for each:
Children observed that starting at 0, counting up 3 hops and then 4 more hops has the same result as starting at 3 and then counting up 4 hops. This connects the counting all addition strategy to the counting on strategy.
Children observed that moving 0 hops means not moving at all and that hopping back the same number as the starting number means landing on 0 because there is no difference between the numbers.
Children observed that counting up 3 hops from 7 gives the same sum as counting up 7 hops from 3. We were reminded of the turn around rule. This week, we also began to add and subtract using unknowns (blanks) in all areas of a question. We used the number line to help us. Some examples can be found below:
Language ArtsOur phonics focus this week was looking at the letter 'y' as a vowel when it comes at the end of the word. We used our knowledge of syllables to find out what sound it usually makes. We used sorts and hunts to solidify this concept. Word sorts are so important for early readers. Categorizing is the fundamental way that humans make sense of the world. When students sorts words they are engaged in the active process of searching, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing. Word sorts help students organize what they know about words and to form generalizations that they can then apply to new words they encounter in their reading This week we looked at the life cycle of a pumpkin during our unit of inquiry. During language arts time, students read, and wrote all about pumpkins. One new type of word we looked at were adjectives. Students worked in groups to come up with a number of adjectives to describe their pumpkin. When reading and writing, children learn to think deeply and they learn what sentences have meaning. When we write sentences the most important facts are nouns and verbs. We have to use them when we write sentences. However, if we want to write better sentences, we use adjectives and it is quite important. The reason adjectives are important is that adjectives describe nouns and make sentences more meaningful. As your children learn more about writing, they will start to use adjectives. Please come up with adjectives for all types of things and people in your lives. Unit of InquiryThis week, we took a look at the plants we grew from seeds and started to tend to our garden, making sure that it is watered and weeded. We followed up on our home-learning from last week about seed dispersal. We reviewed seed dispersal methods, and then worked in groups on a design challenge to see who could create a seed dispersal method that could get their seed to travel the furthest off the balcony. Design is our future. Have you heard that phrase before? People are writing books about it, TED is talking about it, and innovation consultancy IDEO is banking on it. Design helps innovators dream big, while dreaming big on something that people really need. So why should you care? Because our kids are our future, just like design, and if they’re better prepared for the modern world, the modern world will get better. I will digress further about design thinking later in this blog post. When we finished wrapping up our home learning, we began exploring the life cycle of a pumpkin. I love looking at this life cycle because it is a little different than that of a flower, and lets us learn about vines, a new part of a plant. We learned about the parts of a pumpkin and some other fun facts. After that, Mr. Joe came to join us for a 'Run Away Pumpkin' Design challenge. We watched the video below and read the book "Marley and the Runaway Pumpkin" to get our brains ready for the challenge, and to connect literacy to our unit of inquiry. Students were presented with another design challenge. To build a ramp to make a pumpkin travel the furthest. We learned about friction, inclined planes, measurement, shape, materials, and design thinking. Now we are back to the topic of design thinking: Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to help them solve complex problems and create solutions & products that meet people’s needs. It’s solution-based thinking that starts with a general goal, not just a specific problem to help create broader ideas. The next day, we dissected one of our pumpkins. Students looked at all of the parts of the pumpkin first hand, feeling and exploring the: rind, pulp, strands, seeds, ribs and stem. We also baked the pumpkin, mashed it, and used it in a recipe to make pumpkin bread. We then roasted, spiced and ate the seeds. I encourage you to try this at home with the recipes above. I love cooking with children, it teaches so many skills 1. Math Skills: division, counting, measuring capacity, measuring temperature, measuring time 2. Reading Comprehension: Reading and understanding step-by-step directions, adding ingredients in sequence, and techniques such as folding and blending, are all important components to yielding the finished food product. Helping your child fine tune his or reading comprehension skills at the same time doesn't hurt! 3. Real Life Science: Cooking is a science experiment. Too much salt, baking powder, not enough flour, or the wrong timing and you're likely to have a flop on your hands. Cooking provides an opportunity for kids to get hands-on experience with basic science. 4. Self-Esteem: Cooking allows kids to get instant feedback, which helps them learn and grow in self-knowledge. Learning a new skill, such as baking or cooking, is known to help grade school children with healthy self-esteem development. 5. Communication: A relaxed atmosphere in the kitchen offers an opportunity to talk, about anything! Parents can take advantage of this, as communication is a key element to raising a well-adjusted, healthy child. 6. Life Skills: Cooking is a life skill, much like driving a car, learning to read, or swimming. As children grow and get closer to adulthood, the job of feeding becomes theirs. Start the cooking lessons at a young age so the transition to adult cook is easy later on. With the rest of our pumpkins, we opened them up for jack-o-lanterns, checked to see if they float, measured their circumference with paper clips, measured their heights with cubes, counted their seeds, and planted some seeds. There was so much Math happening, and so much fun. We had a blast exploring pumpkins, and are excited to design and carve our jack-o-lanterns next week. I am so happy we are all back at school together,
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MathIn Math this week, we finished our unit on introducing addition, and have begun a new unit on number stories. While we do work through the Everyday Math program at ASA, we also make implementing math into our units of inquiry a priority. It is so important for students to see how Math is integrated into our daily lives. We use the Everyday Math program to teach essential skills in Math, that may not always integrate into our units. With that in mind, I will do my best to make all number stories in this unit related to our unit of inquiry on life cycles. Please find the unit 3 parent letter below. This week, we reviewed what number stories are, and explained that not all number stories are change-to-more or change-to-less situations. Our little leaners learned about another type of situation. I told the following number story for example: Theresa has 3 flowers in her backpack and 6 flowers in her desk. How many flowers does she have all together? First our learners talked to make sense of the problem, and to solve it any way they can (using counters, drawings, number models, or other strategies from the Strategy Wall). We recorded our strategies and solutions on the board. I then introduced the parts-and-total diagram to summarize the number story and to help children organize their thinking.
I asked the children to help me write a number model for this story. We connected the diagram to the number model by asking children how each of the terms in the number model relates to the diagram. Sample answer: The two numbers we add together are the parts, and the sum is the total in the diagram; 3 + 6 = 9. Students then worked in partners to use parts-and-total diagrams to tell and solve number stories. Students were encouraged to record their solution strategies. When partnerships finished, we came together to discuss their thinking. Later in the week, students used dominoes to continue working with parts-and-total diagrams. The children practiced drawing parts-and-total diagrams and writing number sentences for dominoes on their slates. Volunteers chose dominoes and named the three numbers for each. Half of the class completed a parts-and-total diagram, and the other half recorded a number sentence. We discussed the diagrams and number sentences to help children make connections between them. Language ArtsThis week in Language Arts, we looked at syllables. A syllable is a single, unbroken sound of a spoken (or written) word. Syllables usually contain a vowel and accompanying consonants. Sometimes syllables are referred to as the ‘beats’ of spoken language. The number of times you hear a vowel (a, e, i , o, u) in a word is equal to the number of syllables a word has. A good way to identify syllables is to think about whether you need to change your mouth shape to say the next bit of the word / the new syllable. We clap out words to hear them, and put our hand under our chins to feel how many times our mouth moves down. Learning about syllables is part of learning how to decode and spell words. It helps children understand the conventions of English spelling, including when to double letters and how to pronounce the vowels in words they might not have seen before. We used pictures and objects to sort words by their number of syllables. This will help us after the break when we learn about when to make the different sounds of the letter 'y'. Children in grade 1 are expected to read words of two syllables. They are shown how to split the words up into syllables, in order to help them sound them out. For example: if they are shown the word ‘thunder’ and get stuck, I (or you at home) may cover the second half of the word (‘der’) and ask them to just sound out the first syllable. Once they have managed this, I uncover the rest of the word and ask them to sound this out. Students are also learning to spell words with two syllables, they are encouraged to separate the two syllables themselves, in order to learn the spelling of the whole word. During our Daily 5 time, Mrs. Mbola and I have been working on decoding strategies with guided reading groups. These are all part of the 'accuracy' section of our Daily CAFE menu. CAFE is the organzation of the reading strategies taught during the Daily 5 time. CAFE is the acronym for the four major components of reading:
Your child will learn reading strategies within each category. These strategies will become tools they learn and apply to help them become better readers and writers. I will keep you informed (here on the blog) of the new strategies that are introduced to the whole class as we move through the CAFE menu. Unit of InquiryThis week, we began a new unit of inquiry on life cycles. To begin our unit, or tune-in, students completed an activity called "picture priorities." This lesson idea comes from Kath Murdoch, an Aussie educator and leader in the field of inquiry-based learning. The strategy asks students to rank, sequence and/or make sense of a series of pictures as a way of helping them to consider what they already know and/or how they feel about a topic. I think this strategy is fantastic because it gets kids thinking! It's a great way to assess their prior knowledge. First, I gathered pictures of a variety of different life cycles. I collected different sets of 4 pictures. Next, I gave the students the pictures along with a large piece of paper on which to order the pictures and record their thoughts. I didn't tell them anything about the content of the pictures; I wanted to leave it totally to their interpretations. My directions were, "I'm giving your group a set of pictures, Your job is to figure out how they go together in a meaningful way. Share your thinking and then you must agree on how to arrange them on the paper." Then students got to thinking! I walked around the room to monitor and make sure that all group members were contributing their ideas. Once groups came to a consensus about the order of their pictures, I asked them to write their thoughts, anything really, about 1 or all of the pictures. Many of them chose to break this task up by having each person in the group write a sentence about one of the pictures. Finally, I had the groups share their posters with the class to debrief the strategy .When we debriefed, I kept it short and focused; "How did your thinking change while you were arranging the pictures?" Some students shared that they recognized that the pictures were all part of a cycle, whereas some students did not have any prior knowledge and they really had to think about it. After figuring out what a life cycle was, students wrote down their questions on our 'wonder wall' about what they wanted to learn about during this unit. Some students asked about what makes something living, about what the parts of a plant do, and how they do their job. This is where we began our inquiry, specifically looking at inquires on - How do plants drink?, and how do seeds grow? While cycles have no specific start and finish point, we thought seeds were a good place to start this unit. First we discussed what made something living. we decided that all living things; grow, change, breath, drink, and eat. We also learned that living things reproduce (enjoy questions about this at home. ha!). Then we went outside to record and find things that were living and non-living. We went back later with our iPads to take some photos of the living things we found. The next student inquiry we looked into was 'how do plants drink?". We learned about the roots and the stem, and how they are in charge of 'drinking' the water, and carrying the water to the rest of the plant. We then collected some white flowers, and put them in water with blue and red food dye to create a visual of how plants drink. The students were amazed at how the white flowers turned blue and red. It was a great way for students to see how plants move water from bottom to top of a plant. With that said, our little inquirers were not satisfied with this. It led to more questions about how the water moves up the plants. This got me explaining capillary action to first graders. Let me tell you, it was really fun explaining the forces of cohesion, adhesion and surface tension to your 6 year olds. However, I felt very successful when I found the experiment below that shows how water molecules 'stick to each other' (cohesion) and stick to the toilet paper (adhesion) and how when one water molecule moves up, it pulls the others with it (surface tension). We talked about how this is kind of how a stem pulls water up to the rest of the plant. Later in the week, we started following some inquires on seeds. I was so proud of myself that I kept some beans from our class garden last year. Students peeled the seeds out of them. It was such a great way to show how life cycles continue again and again. After this, we looked at pictures of seeds and the plants they grow. It was interesting for the little ones to see how plants and seeds look very different. We also looked at all of the amazing seeds that were sent in by parents (you are amazing! Keep them coming), and started to grow some of them in our window. We talked about how different seeds grow different ways, and need different conditions to grow. I am so excited for when we come back form the break for students to see what is growing in the window. We also looked at corn seeds, chia seeds, and avacado seeds. Sometimes during these heavy science based units of inquiry, I struggle to find space for fiction. Luckily, with this seed inquiry, the story 'Jack and the Beanstalk' was a great fit. We read the story, planted our 'magic beans' and created castles in the sky. I am so excited to see your little ones' faces when they 'hopefully' return to growing beans after the break. There was a lot of learning for a 3.5 day week. |
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March 2018
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