February Fun

Working in pairs, students read a book about Abraham Lincoln and wrote the main idea of each section on a post it note.  

We are loving our new audio hub and headphones from Donors Choose.  

This is what math class looked like on Valentine's Day.  We estimated how many hearts were in a box, how many were in a foot, and how many it would take to fill a cup.

Then just for fun, we triedto balance as many as we could on our fingers and make the tallest tower we could.

Mrs. Woods brought a really neat bingo set for us to play.  We used candy hearts as the markers. 

 So many treats!!

This is what was left for each student to take home!!  They'd already eaten quite a bit of sugar!

Mr. Strauman created a stand so that the iPad can be used to project just about anything on to the Promethean.  Here some students are trying to complete a tangram challenge. 

We are using dominoes to practice our fact fluency, graphing and critical thinking skills.  Every teacher loves a three for one activity!  We added the dots on the dominoes, graphed the totals, and then tried to draw conclusions about why each student had more 5, 6, 7 than any other number.

Fortune tellers make practicing parts of speech fun!

Bridges

The challenge:
Put two books 1 foot apart.
Build a bridge between the two books which will support 10 pennies (placed in the center)

Your only bridge building materials - About twenty 3 x 5 index cards

The students worked in pairs or groups of three to complete the challenge.  They only had about 15 minutes. At the very end, a few students figured out to fold the cards for support.  Even thought not all groups built the bridge, they accomplished my main goals -- working together, communicating, thinking outside the box.  We will have challenges like this more often this semester.

Money

We are working on counting pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.  We are also working on solving word problems using those coins.  To help students remember what each coin looks like and is worth, we have been using poems, chants, hand motions and lots of repetition!  Here is one set of coin poems we use:

Rainforest Research

We spent one week studying the rainforest.  Student learned what made an area a rainforest.  They learned about the 4 layers of the rainforest.  They learned why rainforests are being destroyed and why rainforests are important.  The next week, students were given Chromebooks, a list of websites, a list of rainforest animals and time to explore.  After a while, each student picked one animal he/she wanted to research.  Students had several questions to answer about their animal -- what it looks like, how big it is, what it eats, how it survives in its environment, etc.  They set off to find the information.  Students did a great job independently finding the answers to their questions.  The next step was to create a poster which gave the highlights of what they found while researching.  Then, students wrote a paragraph about their animal.  Finally, students gave a short presentation about their animal using their posters as a guide.  Posters will be coming home in a few weeks.