Category Archives: Classroom

Our Class is All a-“Twit”-er

Huh? Let me explain…:)
Remember the class meeting where we talked about origami class pets?  Well, shortly after that we decided (via a class vote) that we wanted Ames to make us a bird.  And because I am crazy addicted to Twitter, they wanted it to be a blue bird.  Love that!

Ames and some other friends have been working on him for a while now, and the finishing touches were made to his blue body on Friday.  They made him blue by coloring in a huge piece of poster board that was then expertly folded into the bird shape.  And they wanted me to have the honors of doing the last few strokes to make him official. Nice, right?  At first I was confused as to why they thought I needed to do this for them, but when I figured out that it was because this made the bird–who is named Twit–officially “ours,” I had to join in.
Here I am putting the finishing touches on the blue that became his body:

 

And here he is, on his nest at the back of one of our meeting areas.  Meet Twit!:

 

And here is the note that hangs just below where he sleeps:

Man, this class is a hoot!  LOVE THEM!

Does your class have a pet?  How did you decide on what to choose? Tell us the story!

What’s All This “Box Factory” Business?–Part 2

If you read the first post I wrote about Box Factory, then you know about the investigation we finished recently related to volume and surface area.

I think that perhaps one of the most powerful parts of the unit came on the last when each group did a reflection of all that they had accomplished during the unit.  I gave them all the posters they had created during our study and asked them to consider these things with their group mates:

They analyzed and discussed, and then went to write their reflections to turn in to me.

It was really great to read about all they’d accomplished during this unit–in their own words.  Time after time they mentioned how it was hard at first, but then as they kept trying or as their group mates helped them, they figured it out.  They noted how helpful the Math Congress comments were to them, and how these thoughts helped them revise their representations for the next time.  They all agreed that this had been a positive experience, and when asked what questions they still had, many said, “When can we do Box Factory again?”  🙂

Robinson Goes HOLLYWOOD!

See the guy in this picture?:

Well, he’s a movie-maker.  A real one.   Ok, I don’t think he’s a Hollywood movie maker, but he does work at a local university as a filmmaker, and he was making a movie with footage of our class!

Our school is working on a movie to highlight the fabulous things we do each day with teaching and learning, and I was asked to talk about how technology has changed the way I teach and the way kids learn in my classroom.  I did a short piece earlier in the day, and then he came to take some shots of us as we utilized the iPads during our math rotations.  My kiddos were pretty excited about being famous!  Can’t wait to see the finished video that showcases the amazing things that happen at our school every day.  It’s a fabulous place to work and learn!

Here are a few more that I took while he was there:

I took this opportunity to introduce my friends to QR codes, which they were really excited about using!

 

The Story of How Alphabox Changed My Life

I love learning.  It’s part of the reason I became a teacher in the first place.  And as my kids will tell you, we’re all teachers in our room, so I’m learning every day!

Aside from learning my students, however, I learn many things from my colleagues, as well!  That’s part of what makes me a better teacher–finding out about new strategies and techniques that are working for others and trying them with my students.  And this is how I found out about the Alphabox.  Credit here needs to go to my friend and 5th grade teammate, Genie Hong.  She introduced me to this strategy the other day and it quickly changed my life forever.  Really it did.  Keep reading. 🙂

Really it’s pretty simple: and Alphabox is a sheet of paper with boxes that each have a different letter of the alphabet in them:

But then the  magic happens.

The Alphabox is an organizer that is aimed at helping students summarize information, by choosing the most important word from a text that they’ve read that starts with each letter of the alphabet.  It can be used with anything, really, but we started with some information we needed to read and digest in our Ancient West Africa unit.

A filled-out Alphabox looks like this:

 

The next step is to put down the book, pick up your paper and try to summarize the part you just read using only the words on your Alphabox!  The first time around this was a bit tricky (some would even say hard!), but once we got into it, we go the hang of it, and really started to enjoy it, actually.  I’ve had several kids mention that they like how this organizer helps them really focus on the important ideas and it sticks in their brains better than things we’ve done before.  I would agree.

Here are some paragraphs we wrote together with our alphaboxes (and sorry for the fact that they have mistakes–I only got pictures of the rough drafts.  I recopied them before I hung them up, I promise!):

I love it when you learn something new and it totally rocks your world! I wonder what I did all those years before I knew about the Alphabox.  It’s so simple, but so powerful.  You should totally try it.  We’re using it all the time now. 🙂

Have you ever used an Alphabox to organize your important ideas?  Tell us what you think. 🙂

Dot, Dash, Slash, Comma (And All That Other Stuff, Too…)

We have been on a journey these last few weeks.  It’s a journey many of my students have never been on before.  And it’s related to these piles of books:

Can you see it?  All the punctuation goodness on that table?  No?  Well my kiddos can now.   Let me tell you about it. 🙂

Punctuation is a funny thing.  No?  You never thought of it that way?  Well, it’s one of those things that has gotten a bad wrap for a long time, and without good cause–in my opinion.  Many people (including most kids!) think of punctuation as a bad word.  It’s just a you-have-to-go-back-and-add-it-in-the-right-place-at-the-end-because-your-teacher-told-you-too kind of a thing.  Not a this-really-matters-and-helps-me-as-a-writer kind of thing.  And that’s too bad.  Punctuation is a powerful tool for a writer, and I want my kiddos to know that.  But it’s only a powerful tool if you know how to use it, and most of my kids don’t.  At least not yet.  With this goal, we started 2nd quarter Writer’s Workshop.

After spending a bit of time on what they already knew (or thought they knew) about punctuation, I asked them to tell me if they’d ever thought about what it meant.  Most said no.  Some even groaned a little bit at the beginning of this conversation when I said the word.  It was obvious that they’d never had a positive experience with this topic, and that made me a little sad.    As a means to hook them in, and get them to understand my goal for this study, we visited a section of a book we have read together and all love: Because of Mr. Terupt by Rob Buyea.  I found a place in the book I knew we could all chew on together; the paragraph right before the big action in the book was a great place to dig in.  I asked them to talk to a partner next to them about why the highlighted sentence was written the way it was, and how it would be different if it had been written without the given punctuation.  We discovered that the punctuation (which was mainly a series of commas) was there to force us as the readers to slow down.  The part just before was fast-paced, crazy and choatic; the commas made us slow down and pay attention to what was happening next.  And what happened next was the climax of the story–without it, the rest of the book wouldn’t have happened.

So remember that pile up there?  After we set the table, and got them feeling a little more love for this idea of punctuation, I put them into study groups.  They had one goal (ok, I guess it was really two): find examples of punctuation in the texts they were given, and figure out what it means when authors use it.  They had a chart to fill out with their partners and a big chunk of time to search.

After the groups had a couple of days to study (yep, you heard right–they worked diligently on this treasure hunt for 2 days!), we gathered to collect our thinking on a big class chart.  They took turned sharing the marks they found and telling the rest of us what they thought it meant. For some this was hard thinking, since they hadn’t done it before.  By the end of the first day we had this:

Ok, that’s not exactly true.  We had all but the hyphen part, but hey–good stuff, right?  They were amazed that they had figured all this out, and that they did it all without me telling them what it was.

The second day we added some thinking about hyphens:

I wish I would have recorded this conversation, because it was so great!  It started with the discovery that a hyphen (-) and a dash (–) are actually two completely different punctuation marks, which mean (and are used in) completely different ways! (Did you know that?) This totally blew some kiddos’ minds and so we had to dig in a little deeper to figure out what each meant.  And hyphens were first.  The first two meanings were hard to explain, but once we started to find examples in the texts we were reading that fit each one, it became more clear.

Since then, we’ve come back every day to add a little more smart thinking.  So far (and we’re only a little past halfway done), we have another whole chart the size of this one, plus we’ve started a third.  The things they are discovering are amazing.  The most amazing–and meaningful–part is that they’re doing it all for themselves.  I’m not pouring the information into their heads, or having them spend time correcting sentences in an isolated exercise for morning work; we’re learning together and really focusing in on what these marks mean.  They’re beginning to care, and they’re beginning to notice these marks more and more–in their reading and now in their own writing!  They are aiming to use them in new ways, and can even tell you how a paragraph is punctuated as I read it aloud to them.  Often I’ll stop after we’ve read something in our chapter book and ask “What do you think that looks like?” and they can tell me exactly what kind of punctuation is there!

Teaching about punctuation is not hard.  But it is time-consuming, and it does require me to know more than I may have first considered about the topic, as well.  But the time that is definitely well spent.  These friends are walking away from each conversation we have with a new understanding of how to they can use punctuation just like word choice, organization, paragraphing, and voice to create a more meaningful experience for the reader.   Pretty cool, right? 🙂

Now the first section hangs on our windows, where it will be there for us to use for the rest of the year!  The goal (and I think they will make it!) is to make their punctuation chart “6 windows” long.  So far we’re at 4 or 5, and still going!  SO MUCH LEARNING!!

What are your feelings about punctuation?  How did you learn about it when you were in school?  How do you teach punctuation in your class?  If you’re a parent, what are you noticing (or hearing) about punctuation with  your student?  Please comment and let us know what you’re thinking! 🙂

Happy Halloween! (A few days late…)

So yeah…Halloween was last week.  Sorry!  I haven’t gotten it up on the blog yet.  Hope you aren’t mad at me for making you wait for this cuteness.

At our school, Halloween is a fun-filled afternoon of costumes, parades and parties.  This year, though, we started a new tradition for our parade.  Next to our school, a great place called Aberdeen Heights was recently built.  We’ve formed a great relationship with them and many classes in our school have connected with the residents there.  So our parade, instead of going around our school went down the street and through their campus!  We had such a great time sharing our costumes, and waving at all the happy residents who came out to see us.  The weather that afternoon was a bit chilly, but so nice and sunny that we hardly even noticed the nip in the air.

Somehow I only managed to get one (not so great) picture of our parade.  Sorry. 😦

After the parade, we came back to school for our party.  There was a group of great parents who planned it for our grade level, and each classroom had a different activity.  We rotated through the fun for an hour or so.  Again….I was having such a great time I guess that I didn’t manage to take very many good pictures.  But I’ll share what I have:

What a great combination of costumes!

Making frames: Anna K., Rosalee, Natalie and Anna C.

Smile! More fun with Fiona, ZB, Sophia and Jack.

Keelan, Peter, Aiden and Seamus making a Halloween frame for pictures we took together.

Sammy, Owen, Ames (yep, I promise that’s him in there!) and Don

Devan, Damonte, Jernandra and Rebekah

Along with the picture frames and photo booth, we also played some games and ate some fabulous Halloween goodies!  The rotation idea was a super one, and the kids seemed to like it.  Thanks to all the great volunteers who made this happen for us!

And now one last bit of Halloween fun:

Mrs. Hong, Mr. Kieschnick, me and Mrs. Brown

Happy Halloween!  How did you spend it?  We’d love to hear about your Halloween traditions. 🙂

Math Warm-Ups Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 2012

This week’s warm-ups–already!  Aren’t you proud?!  Another week of review of things we’ve already done, but needed to tweak a little bit.

Monday

This warm-up was in response to a reflection I had them write the Friday before.  I asked them to tell me what they’d learned during Box Factory, how their thinking had changed, and what questions they still had.  These were ones that came up on several kiddos’ papers.  This was an opportunity for me to see what other kids’ ideas were before I just answered the questions for them.  And what I had hoped would happen did–the other kids in the class gave responses that cleared it up for us all. 🙂

Tuesday

This equation gave us a good reminder of the order of operations, and how you have to DIVIDE or MULTIPLY before you ADD or SUBTRACT.  We ended up with answers of 4 and 16, and had to discuss which one was correct.

Wednesday

This one was from Halloween, can you tell?

Thursday

The discussion of “which comes first” came up again, only this time the answer was that it didn’t matter since both of the signs were division.  You would just do the in order from left to right.

Fridays are a little crazy in our classroom in the morning because many of us come in later due to Instrumental Music, so no Warm-Up today.  Enjoy working through these and let us know what you think.  🙂

What’s All This “Box Factory” Business?–Part 1

You may have heard me or my students mention the Box Factory lately, and wondered what in the world we were talking about.  Let me tell you about this fabulous math work we’ve been doing lately.
In 5th grade, we have a unit on 3D geometry, focused around finding volume of different kinds of rectangular prisms and figuring out a formula for how to do this (l x w x h or b x h).  This year we incorporated a unit by Cathy Fosnot, which created a context for this learning.  Enter the “Box Factory.”

The basic premise of the investigation is that kids work in a box factory and have to figure out certain things related to volume and surface area (although these things are not specifically named until later in the unit).  There were three parts, and kids worked small groups to investigate the answers to these questions:
1.  If the box factory wanted to create boxes that held 24 items, how many different boxes could they create?  What would the dimensions be of those boxes? Which box would be the cheapest one to produce? There were 16 possible answers to this question, and the students used cubes, graph paper, equations, drawings, or whatever necessary to figure it out.  They had to then create a poster to show their strategies and explain their thinking to show to the other groups.

2. How much cardboard would you need to cover each of these boxes? This one extended the conversation into surface area, and invited students to now look at the outside of the box, instead of just the inside.  Most groups figured out that if they used the formula (2 x L) + (2 x W) + (2 x H) to determine how much cardboard they’d need.  The cheapest boxes to make would be ones that are closest to the shape of a cube, as opposed to a long, skinny box.

3.  If the factory created three sizes of cube-shaped boxes–2 x 2 x 2, 3 x 3 x 3, and 4 x 4 x4, how many units could each hold?  If it costs 12 cents per unit, how much would each box cost?  This one looked at the inside again, and added another layer of multiplication (with money) to figure out the final answers.

 

All throughout this investigation (which goes for about 10 days), the focus is on kids discovering strategies for volume, rather than just giving it to them.  Through the posters they create and the Math Congress conversations we share, they are also working on sharing and representing their thinking.  They are learning how to make their representations clear and concise so that other people can understand exactly what they did.

This poster-sharing part is not new to me in Math Workshop.  But Fosnot’s unit added a layer I’ve never thought of before in math–revision.  Much like when mathematicians publish proofs (and like we’d just spent time on in Writer’s Workshop!), students were able to get feedback from others on what worked, what was confusing, what they should add or take away.  They they had the opportunity to revise and edit their posters before they shared.  With each new poster they created, they added new ways of showing their thinking clearly.   They did this by discussing with their group, and then leaving suggestions on post-its.  We used the “Plus-delta” model to share something we liked and something we’d change:

 

So by the third time around, we were pretty great at showing thinking on our posters.  Even though you didn’t see all the steps, you can still appreciate the clarity and organization of these:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you ever done a Cathy Fosnot unit before?  How have you used revision and feedback in math to clarify thinking? What strategies do you use for teaching volume? We’d love to hear about it!

Cahokia Mounds!

On Friday, we took a 5th Grade Field Trip to Cahokia Mounds!  Remember how we had just had a Social Studies unit on Mental Models and the Mississippians at Cahokia?  Well we topped it off with a trip to visit the site, since it’s just a short bus ride from our school.
Probably best to tell about it with some pictures!

This must be our bus–it’s #202! That’s the same as our classroom! It seems that that number is everywhere lately. It was the room number in two of the last chapter books we read, and now on our bus. Funny.

Getting on the bus. Jack’s excited, can you tell?

We arrive at Cahokia! The weather ended up being about 50 degrees, windy and rainy. Not what we had expected earlier in the week, but we survived. At least it wasn’t 90 degrees outside–which it very well could have been! This was better, even if we were a bit chilly and wet.

See that? It’s Monk’s Mound! We learned all about it during our study, and now we were going to be able to climb to the top! Talk about history in action!

View from the top: way in the distance you can see the St. Louis Arch. Maybe. If you squint. I promise, it’s there.

Inside, at the interpretive center, there was a museum with many artifacts (or replicas of them) that we had talked about during our study. Again, how cool to see what we had read and talked about. Here are some examples of chunkey stones, which are from a game that the Cahokians played. Many chunkey stones were found in the graves of important people from their society.

How to Play Chunkey. In case you were wondering.

Model of an archeological dig

We studied this pot during our unit. It looks like an ordinary pot, but the fact that it has a face on it is important. This meant that they must have had time for art–to make things pretty, not just practical. This tied to the fact that the Cahokians must have had a surplus of food; hungry people don’t take time out for “extra” stuff like this.

Exhibit that showed all that the Cahokians farmed and grew in their city. Some of us were surprised that they were farmers. Many had the mental model that Native Americans were only hunters who ate buffalo.

Mrs. McChesney’s group shot from the top of Monk’s Mound

Thanks, Mrs. Edwards, for being a chaperone! Your group had a great time, I’m sure.

Mrs. Cseri and her group outside. They look warm and cozy, don’t they, even though it was wet and chilly out there!

Mr. Browning with his group in the museum. Again–they look like they’re having a great time learning on this trip!

Before we went back to school, we had a picnic lunch. Yep, outside. In the wind and cold. These kids have never eaten so fast!

Headed back to the nice, warm bus. 🙂

Despite the less-than-perfect weather, we had a great day!  We’re lucky to be able to get to see examples of the things we read about in our books.  This personal experience made much of it make a lot more sense, and it is solidified for us, now.  Thanks to all the adults who made this day possible for us!

We had a great day at Cahokia.  Have you ever been there?  What did you like?  What did you learn?  What other field trips have you gone on?  Leave us a comment and tell us about it!

Math Warm-Ups Oct. 8-12, 2012

This week we were working with volume and surface area, so our warm-ups had to do with those topics.

Monday

 

Tuesday

This one was interesting.  I asked it purposely because of the work we had been doing with The Box Factory investigation  for the last week–which is all about how to build boxes that hold 24 objects–and was about volume.  We hadn’t named it as volume yet, though, and I wanted to see how many people would make that connection.  Many of them did not.  I saw many “thinking faces” as they struggled with how to answer this one.  I heard someone say, “I don’t remember what volume is…” and then several people answered with what it was, but didn’t tell how you’d find it.  We had a great conversation about this one, and I heard lots of “oh!” when I told them that they’d been working with volume for a whole week.

 

Wednesday

This one was again related to the work we’d been doing during Math Workshop.  They are used to seeing this kind of equation, since we’d spent a couple of weeks on order of operations recently, and we had been using this kind of equation in our volume work–the parentheses told the equation for the bottom of the box, and the last number told how many layers there were.  But I wanted to see if they could explain the formula for finding volume, and tell how they multiplied length x width x height.  They don’t need to know this yet, but I thought they were ready for it, so I threw it at them.  And many–probably most really–figured it out.  We brought the rest of them along through the conversation we had around it.

 

Thursday

There was not a math warm-up on Thursday because we needed those ten minutes to work on our volume projects.

 

Friday

The dimensions on this warm-up were from three boxes we’d been working with this week.  We’d talked several times about how this was really the same box, turned two different ways to make a new base, so with different dimensions.  We’d already talked about the Commutative Property in warm-ups, and so I wanted to see if anyone knew about how this illustrated the Associative Property. Again, a great conversation and many connections were made as we talked.  Have I said before how much I LOVE these warm-ups?  So many great things happen in just a quick discussion.  Love it!

Happy solving!  What do you know about volume and surface area?  What can you teach us? 🙂