Category Archives: Uncategorized

Math Warm-ups Nov. 5-9, 2012

This was a slim week for math warm-ups.  We didn’t have school on Tuesday because of Election Day, and then I guess since we were in between units, there were really any good questions that came to mind.  That being said, I feel like I should apologize for these; they may not be very helpful to those of you who were here to get ideas.  Next will be better.  I promise. 🙂

 

I think this one was from Monday.  It was related to an assessment that my friends had finished the week before.  I was out of the classroom for a meeting when they did it, so partly this question was to get a better feel for how they perceived their performance on it.  I’m glad I asked, because their words told me more than the note from the sub about how it had gone.  They felt better than it had at first seemed they did.

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I don’t think we had another warm-up until Friday, and this was it.  At the beginning of a unit, I usually ask this same type of tell-me-what-you-already-know question. 🙂

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Thanks for reading!

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. 🙂

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.  🙂

More Math Warm Ups from October 2012

I hate that I don’t have dates on these.  That’s what happens when you get too lazy busy to post them in the week you actually did them!  But hey, it’s better than they’re here, right?  These were from the last couple of weeks of school.  We’ve been studying volume, which I hope you can tell from the questions I asked.

This was one a review at the end of a division unit that we just did.  Needed to double check that they hadn’t forgotten how to do it with 4-digit numbers!

 

This one is a great example about how we use our blogs in every subject, and on this day we were writing about math.  Box Factory had given us much to talk about, and this was their chance to show me what they’d learned.  Be sure to check out what they said on our blogs.  They used the tag Box Factory to organize these posts.  The second day this one was up, I added the last part, since some needed to get ready for Math Workshop later in the day.

 

My son, Riley, who is in kindergarten, go involved with this warm-up.  He has been working on drawing smiley faces, as well as learning to underline, so he wanted to put his mark on our chart this day.  Again, we went back to division for added practice.

 

This one was an extra special warm-up, because it totally came up by accident.  The backstory is that a few days before, Riley had been building with the multilink cubes in our room and created this tower:

The more I looked at it, I thought it would be a great extension of the volume work we’d just done.  My hope was that kiddos would see that they could use the formula for volume that they’d just learned to find how many cubes were in the main rectangular prism and then add on the top “extra” ones.  And that’s exactly what they did.  (And again, you see Riley practicing his teaching–and writing–skills as he contributed to making the chart.)

 

 

This was the next day, to give them another similar type of tower.  This time it looked like this:

Similar idea, too: there are two big prisms, plus a little one that is 2 x 2 x 3 in the middle, then those 4 extra ones on the side.  Again, my friends did not disappoint, and figured out how they could use what they already know to figure it out.  Riley was very impressed with their smart thinking, and was eager to learn what they had figured out when I picked him up at the end of the day.

 

There was one more tower–which I guess I didn’t get a picture of, sorry!–and the focus today was really more on how to write what we did, how to record the thinking when you do it in steps.  This connected really nicely to all the work we had done previously with grouping symbols and order of operations.  Love that!

Stay tuned in the next few days for this week’s warm-ups.  I promise I won’t make you wait as long as you did for these. 🙂

We’re Connecting with the World. Again. :)

If you’ve been here for a while, then you know about the map that hangs in our classroom.  And then how it changed after some really good suggestions from some really smart 5th graders. If you’re new here, or you haven’t read those past posts, then let me tell you about it.
Blogging is a great activity for so many reasons.  I read blog post from fellow teacher and blogger Pernille Ripp the other day that really summed up everything I wanted to say about the “why” of blogging.  One of the really important benefits, which goes along with Common Core beautifully, is the global connection that blogging brings with it.  Children have the opportunity to reach outside themselves, sometimes to “talk” to people from places they’ve never heard of or don’t know much about.

 

In our classroom, we have this map.  Right now it looks really sad and empty:

But it doesn’t have to stay like that, and that’s where you come in.  On this map, we’re going to keep track of the places from where all of our comments come.   As readers leave comments–and tell us where they live–we’ll put in pins to show us all the places where we’ve made a connection.  We’re hoping to be able to reach as many countries and continents as we can!  So far, we actually have had comments from several places in Missouri, Alabama (thanks Mrs. Clark!), Kentucky (thanks Mr. Browning!), Argentina (courtesy of @gret in Buenos Aires!), Alaska (thanks Ms. Girard), and Australia (from Mr. Mannell, who is a regular visitor to our blog!)!  I’m a little late in getting those in, but partly because I was hoping that after this post, we’d have tons more to add!
So…if you are willing, after you read this blog, or our kid blogs, leave a comment and tell us what you think (and maybe if you’ve already commented, but didn’t tell us your location, come back again)!  Please tell us where in the world you live, so we can add you to our global connections!  We’re excited to see how our knowledge of the world grows as our pins are added and we continue on this journey!  Thanks in advance for your help!  We’re excited to meet you. 🙂

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!