Wednesday was a busy day at school. What were we busy doing? Hanging up all those posters I showed you yesterday:
It’s funny, I look at that picture now and all I can ask myself is “Why didn’t you move that silly recycle bin?” Hee hee
And then this happened while we were in the library after all of our poster hanging: 
Cute, right? Used by a teacher on our Facebook page as our countdown for “5 days.” Love. 🙂
I REALLY want to show you the WHOLE thing about this project, but instead I’ll just show you two pictures as a tease for a later story. They’re the pictures of the day for today, but they’ve been in the works since last week at this time. And you know, I think I’m just going to let you wonder. To let the pictures speak for themselves and see what happens….:)
I’m not really sure that there’s much to say about this POD except that may “but who’s counting?” I probably shouldn’t be, because there’s still so much to do!! Here’s to finishing strong with our last week and a half!
I have taken SO MANY PICTURES this week. Ok, so that’s true about every week, and every day it’s hard to choose just 1 (or 10) to post.
Today I have just one:
To me, there are probably a thousand things that this picture says about Rm. 202 friends. Here are a few that I’ll mention:
It seems like Amelia is always matching someone in our room. Today her twin was Lauren and aren’t they SUPER CUTE?? 🙂
Oh, and there’s a shoe update. And yes, those crazy kids are putting bunny-ears on my feet. Only in first grade. 🙂
This one is in honor of our friend Diego. 🙂
Check out the really difficult task we’ve been working on with completing our series of books. This is BIG first grade work, but they’re definitely up to the task. This was what our morning looked like today:
Did you know that sometimes at the end of the school year, kids FORGET that they’re supposed to be nice to each other and follow the rules at their school? That happened to us. So, we sat down and made a chart of #nicethingstodoandsay to help us remember how to show that we care about each other.
Here’s a picture of what it looks like:
We figured that if we could use this chart to help us, then you could, too! So we decided to share it–with our Robinson friends, and even people outside of our school. With kids AND with grown-ups! Anyone can read it and use it to help them show someone they care about them.
We know we are going to use this list. What about you? How will YOU show that someone else matters? What #nicethingstodoandsay will you choose? Leave us a comment, or tweet to us at @jbeardensclass to tell us how it’s working out for you!
We are in the midst of MANY crazy and creative projects right now. This picture was taken during one of them:
First of all, I wish that iPad cameras had flash. Just sayin’. 🙂
So we’ve begun our first cycle of #geniushour in Rm. 202 and we’ve wrangled in our Learning Buddies to help us! I’m super impressed with how quickly these kiddos have gotten into these projects and how personal and interesting they are! We’ve got things from glass and The Leaning Tower of Pisa to ice cream and tornadoes, with loads of other things in between. SUPER excited to see what these friends come up with and will be sure to share their projects and learning when we’ve finished! #somanysuperthingshappeningrightnow
This picture is from something that happened today as we embarked on (yet another!) inspiring project:
It’s related to a really cool conversation we had the other day about ways to show that you care for someone, and the idea sparked a HUGE idea for venues outside our classroom that we could spread the love. We watched a @wonderopolis video about hashtags today, and so as we began to brainstorm, Millie wanted us to create our own brand new hashtag. Well…I think we did it. These are the only two tweets that come up when you search the hashtag #nicethingstodoandsay, which tells me that those are the only two tweets that have been written. And they’re both ours. (Ok, yeah, and don’t tell us if it’s not true–hee hee). CANNOT wait to show this to Rm. 202 kiddos tomorrow!
I had thoughts all last week of how I couldn’t wait until the Warm-Ups post to brag on the awesomeness that happened, but alas, I guess I saved it anyway….so get ready, this is definitely NOT first grade math happening here, people!
We had three problems this week, and they were all in the same vein–2-digit subtraction where kiddos were asked to try ALL 4 STRATEGIES we’ve worked on in our class this year. And they were up to the challenge, even though it had been a while since we’d worked on subtraction. I was SUPER impressed, and I think they were, too!
The benchmark in 1st grade says that only have to be able to subtract to 20, but since we were doing addition to 100, we went ahead and followed along with subtraction as well (why stop them if they can go farther??). They also only had to be able to do it in 2 ways, but again, I think it’s good to be flexible with strategy and begin (even as a first grader) to learn which strategy is best for the numbers. In this case we used each strategy each time, but talked about which ones made the most sense. Let me show you the part we were most proud of:
I don’t know if you can tell, but that’s not an ordinary 2-digit subtraction problem. Nope–it’s one that will need to use what we used to called regrouping but that honestly now we don’t really call anything. It’s just what you do to make the problem work! Please also notice that there’s no “stacking” or traditional algorithms here and these littles can still figure out the solution. Nice, right? I know some wouldn’t believe it’s possible….:)
My favorite part is when we started with sticks and dots, and we realized that we couldn’t do what the numbers told us to do–we couldn’t take 7 dots away from the 5 we had drawn. Millie noticed it right away and then we had a great conversation about what we could do about that. Makayla suggested that actually there were 10 dots inside each of the sticks we drew (how’s that place value work for ya?). We decided if we crossed off that last stick (which represents a 10) and added those 10 dots instead to the dots already there, then we could do it. We ended up with 15 dots (ones) that we could take 7 away from. We used the double-minus-1 problem of 14-7 is 7 so 15-7 is 8 to get that part of our answer.
Then, when we tried to do the same problem with splitting, we ran into the same problem–we didn’t enough to do that part of our problem. Since we had just done it, we knew we could try it again, and moved the 10 from our 90 to make 80 and then the 5 became 15. Voila! It all worked out. 🙂
This is some pretty amazing stuff, and I’m impressed to hear both their fearlessness and pride when they figure out what to do. I also love how differently 1st graders seem to tackle problems like this that are hard, or challenging, or that don’t at first seem like they’ll work–they just jump in and try something and see what happens. They haven’t yet learned that they can’t do it, they aren’t worried about whether or not they make a mistake, they know they have many tools in their toolboxes that they can use till they figure it out. I hope to be able to encourage this kind of approach to problem solving as I work with them again next year—crossing my fingers that I can help them keep that mindset for longer than maybe they would have…there’s hope at least. 🙂
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 