100th Day!

Monday was our 100th day of school. We had a fun morning doing a variety of activities centered on the number 100. The kids always love making 100 day Trail Mix. They get to choose 10 different items (from a selection of dried fruit, bite-sized cereal and crackers, seeds, & chocolate chips) and get 10 of each item. They line their choices up on a hundreds chart then slip it into a bag to munch on. Another favorite is the 100 pig hunt. While one teacher reads Pigs in Hiding, the others hide 100 numbered paper pigs around the main part of the classroom. Excitement ensues as the children try to find all the pigs. As they are found, their numbers are turned around on a hundreds pocket chart. We are now down to about 8 unfound pigs. Some years the last ones don't turn up until end of year cleanup!

Every student had a collection of 100 items to put on display. They all arranged their collections along with a written description. River Class came to visit, and we had a chance to view our classmates collections. It was a wide variety that included collections of shells, rocks, Hershey's kisses, drawings of flowers, pictures created in Photoshop, legos, coins, etc. Students did 100 foot relays, played games with a hundreds chart, colored 100 hearts and 100 stars, worked to write 100 words, and strung necklaces of 100 beads. We are still working on filling a chart with 100 equations that equal 100.

Pictures: Upper left: making 100 item trail mix Upper right: game with the 100 chart
Lower left: a building for 100 frog counters

"But it doesn't come out even!"

This is another journal problem that can puzzle the kids because it doesn't come out even. Today I asked my students to consider this problem:
You invite 10 friends over for a party. You want to serve juice. You want enough for each person to have 1 cup. The extra special juice you want to buy (raspberry razzle-dazzle kiwi!) only comes in quarts. (At this point I asked the students to remember how many cups are in a quart and one of the students supplied 4.) How many quarts do you need to buy? Prove your answer.

Quite a few asked for help. For each I asked leading questions until they came up with an answer and a way to express their understanding of it. Some included themselves in the planning and some did not. One kept trying to adjust the number of people so that every cup was accounted for: "well my parents could come, or maybe I'll have one go out and one stay." That extra cup tends to bother them a lot and I don't think it is in the name of "waste not want not." For them division should be neat and tidy. We'll share our solutions soon. I hope problems like this help them reach some peace with the idea that math can be messy!

S'marvelous S'math

We include activities in our curriculum that we call S'math because they use science and math together. One source for ideas is AIMS Education Foundation (http://www.aimsedu.org/). AIMS stands for Activities Integrating Math & Science. We also draw on other sources to "cook" up our plans, drawing in any themes we are pursuing as well as student interests.

This year our whole Lower School theme is "Way to Grow." Some of our early S'math activities focused on plants, using our Sky Class garden at times. We are also studying the human body and learning about its systems and parts. One activity focused on the skeleton as we explored bones and joints. More recently we did an activity (drawn from Marilyn Burns) in which students were asked to estimate how many times a strings equal to their heights would go around their heads at the forehead. We then went on to explore other body ratios (How does your height relate to your wingspan? How does your height relate to the length of your leg?)

Rachel Counts (in more ways than one!)

I am enjoying Winter Break, a chance to catch my breath in the midst of a busy school year. We are in the Smokies with family for the holidays. This has given me lots of good time with granddaughter Rachel, who reports her age as three and three-quarters. Like her father and uncle when they were this age, she delights in patterns and numbers. We count pennies as we play dreidel. We count blocks and toys and the cookies we cut out of the sugar cookie dough. We count cards as we play Concentration (Memory), where she shows a strong visual memory. Her number sense seems to strengthen every day. We were building with her baby sister's blocks one day. We had established the previous day there were ten of the soft rubbery blocks in all. We were trying to recreate a structure we had built the day before, but could not as some were missing. She carefully counted out eight blocks. I asked her how many were missing. She thought for a moment. "Two! " she announced. Later we found one of the missing blocks and added a bear to the structure.

Who Knows How the Time Goes?

Telling Time is a usual topic for kids this age. Over the years, as digital clocks have become more common and analog clocks have become rarer, I've had to give thought to how much emphasis to put on telling time with an analog clock. While a digital clock is easier to "read," an analog clock, to my mind, gives a clearer sense of the passage of time and fractions of an hour. So while some of my students report that they do not have even one analog clock at home, I continue to spend some time on working with analog clocks. We use mini instructional clocks so that each student has one and can move the hands as we try to both set certain times and read times from the clock. I think one reason learning to read an analog clock is challenging for some students is that the numbers mean different things depending on whether you are looking at the hour hand or the minute hand. For concrete thinking seven and eight year olds, this can take some getting used to.

A Whole Lot of Counting Going On

And measuring and estimating and adding and multiplying and spotting shapes! On Thursday we had Math Day in Lower School. The morning was devoted to a variety of math activities. Each student got to choose 3 activities in which to participate, everything from Math Basketball and Math Baseball to Tangrams to Brain Teasers to Math Games. I offered a Math Scavenger Hunt. Students were challenged to count and measure various things on the playground and in the class. Some of the things they counted generated numbers to add and multiply. There were jars of items for estimation and counting. They looked for where they could find different geometric shapes on the playground and made a face with shapes. Fortunately the threatening clouds held off with their rain until afternoon, so students could measure the alligator sculpture in the Dragon Garden and do the other outside tasks. It was a great way to celebrate Math.

Turtle Explorations

We have been learning about a simple computer programming language called Logo that was developed at MIT as an educational aid for children. In Logo the cursor is a “turtle” who moves across the screen creating graphics based on the commands given by the children. We have learned some basic Logo commands, and students are beginning to write out programs (a series of commands) which they can then type into the computer to see the results. This project has generated a great deal of excitement in our group. It has also been our first time to use the new mobile laptop lab which has added to the excitement.