Mrs. Goolsby and Mrs. Harwood's classes joined me for a spider web engineering lesson! Students brainstormed everything they knew about spiders and then we built our own spider webs using cups for the base, yarn, and tape. Students had to try and construct a web that would hold the most blocks (insects) in it! They had to build, test, rebuild, and then retest in order to improve their design. We were very impressed with the focus of our students!
It is so exciting when I learn and find out about new technology activities from my fellow GT teachers in the county! One of our amazing GT teachers went to a conference and brought back the BeeBots for us to use! These little bee robots are able to be programmed by the students to move forward, backward, turn left or right, and GO! After learning about how to make the BeeBot move, students worked in a small group in order to program the BeeBot to trace a number written in digital number format. Students first measured and drew out the digital format numbers using exactly 15 centimeters per line. Because students had to determine location of the BeeBot to turn him in the right direction, the students found this to be a very challenging project! Students have explored some challenging multiplication problems. Some of the problems were multi step and required thinking that was slightly outside the box. Students were given manipulatives (orange unifix cubes as oranges, pipe cleaners to represent poles, pretend money, and blue cards as baseball cards) to help focus them on the intent of the problem. Then students were asked to draw out the bar diagram for Singapore math for each problem, identify the multiplication property if represented, and determine whether the answer was even or odd.
In 5th grade LA with Mrs. Foster, the students are learning about historical fiction. Students chose their good fit books, with many students choosing Number the Stars or Snow Treasure. We worked on the story "The Ides of March" with each group that was leveled appropriately for their reading level. During guided reading, we focused on the theme of betrayal as well as unknown words such as "pediment".
Last week, my Itchy Iguanas met with me to explore their Dinosaur story. We reread the text and then created two timelines: one of the timelines of a dinosaur's life from egg to death and one on the Eras of Dinosaurs. This week, we went over our fall and plants stories to go with Mrs. Denton's exciting pumpkin science experiment and pumpkin guts activity! Students chose a sentence about pumpkins from the text and stretched the sentence out to include all the details. I introduced the words adjectives and adverbs to the students in order to help them with this activity.
In Mrs. Motley's class we have moved from our place value unit to our computations skills. I am working with my groups on problem solving using the "U-P-S Check strategy" to make sure that students Understand, Plan, Solve, and Check their work when faced with word problems.
We used Singapore math bar diagrams to solve word problems. Students had to use their understanding to determine whether they needed to add or subtract for each word problem. My group of students worked with larger numbers over 0s to subtract, moving up to the millions with regrouping over 3 0s in a row. The best strategy we can encourage our students with subtraction is to check their work by adding. Please encourage students to show this strategy on their homework! :) During our language arts time, I worked with Mrs. Denton's Itchy Iguanas on their Building Bridges text. This nonfiction piece described different types of bridges. We reviewed the book and then watched a prezi presentation on building a bridge. Students then used unifix cubes to create their own bridge in the classroom using one of the designs from the book that spanned the length of two tables. Students chose to use columns to support their bridge in order to have a car drive across the top of it. After the students attempted to build a bridge (it didn't work this time!) then students compared the bridge they used to one of the bridges in the book on a Venn Diagram. Students stapled this Venn Diagram into their Reader's response journal. I love visiting Mrs. Catron's classroom for math class. In October I visited her room to teach students the expectations for an exemplar. Students used rubrics that were designed to show students the expectation for a "4-Expert" rating on a math problem. We used an exemplar that asked students to determine how many pips were on a set of 0-9 dominoes.
The remaining two 2nd grade classes went on their archaeology hunts! We used our iPads to locate different dinosaur bones throughout the school, put them together in puzzle fashion, and then measured them. We finished by graphing each measurement of the dinosaurs. In first grade I've had the opportunity to explore enrichment math activities on Monday mornings! We worked with Pete the Cat on graphing. After showing a video clip of the Pete the Cat book, students chose their favorite color of the shoes. We used our data of our favorite colors to create a tally chart, a picture graph, a circle graph, and a bar graph! Students brought home their bar graphs they made for parents to see.
In addition, I worked with two math groups on a hundreds and a hundred and twenty chart puzzle. They had to identify what numbers were missing from beside, on top, and below the number that were filled in. Students found this activity challenging, and it took us two weeks to complete the puzzles. Students who finished early got to play a "Roll to 120" game! |