Tag Archives: Walker’s Club

Pictures of the Day–April 23, 2015

What a great day back with my friends in Rm. 202!  Besides being a BEAUTIFUL Thursday, we also enjoyed another Walker’s Club day, as well as A.C.E.S. Day, which is a Robinson favorite every Spring.  A.C.E.S. stands for All Children Exercising Simultaneously, and I found out today it’s a 15 year tradition at our school (which is actually almost as long as I’ve been teaching there–I hadn’t realized it started at the same time!).  Here’s a pic from our fun today:

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Ok, so to be fair, it’s not actually from our festivities, but is inspired by them. Sara got to participate in Mrs. Clark’s A.C.E.S. Day routine to the song “Jump” and got some pretty great glasses as a result. Awesome, right? 🙂

For more on how Robinson can shake their booties, have a lot of fun and be healthy, check out teh link to our Facebook page here.  There’s a video and a TON of pictures to enjoy!  I was too busy moving and grooving I didn’t get ANYTHING to share.  Unbelieveable, right?  Luckily pretty much EVERYONE else had a phone or a camera. 🙂

I have one more picture, and I guess actually it’s more a number than a picture, but it’s this:

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That’s our new Walker’s Club total for the April Competition.  I’m amazed and impressed with our steady work towards a goal of winning recess and popsicles (plus having fun and getting healthy!)!  Keep it up, Rm. 202 kids!

First Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of April 13-17, 2015

Just like the focus several weeks ago was Walker’s Club, and last week’s were about data, these are data-focused as well.

Tuesday

This one was kind of a freebie, but was supposed to get kiddos ready for the work we’d do later on in the day (which really is the focus of how the Math Warm-Ups are meant to work anyway. 🙂 ).

IMG_4454 Wednesday

The warm-up on Wednesday was a little different from previous ones lately, whereas instead of them collecting the data, kids were asked to analyze the data and tell what they have learned from the data I’ve given them.

IMG_4453 Thursday

This one’s all about the chart Mrs. Appelbaum shared with us about the many ways we can represent the data we collect (which is exactly what kiddos would be doing later in the day!).  This one got them thinking early in the day, and also served as the introduction to our math lesson.

IMG_4452  Friday

This one, you can tell, is not about data (directly), but IS about Walker’s Club laps and is a SUPER HARD one for first graders (our benchmark for addition is 2-digit numbers up to 100).  But you know what?  They TOTALLY KNEW WHAT TO DO!!  Those strategies we learned and used for 2-digit numbers?  They work for hundreds, too!  Way to go, Rm. 202 kiddos.  But you know what? I’m not surprised.  You’re pretty much always awesome. 🙂

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Picture of the Day–April 20, 2015

Boo.  I only have 1 picture today, and it’s not even really from today (I know, I could have not told you that and you’d never have known.  Oops.), but it works for today as well as it did for Friday.  I was going to use it in a Walker’s Club update, and also for Math Warm-Up post, but alas I CAN’T GET THE PICTURES I NEED OUT OF MY PHONE!!  I am not someone who curses or hits things, so I might spit.  Or frown alot.  Or just say, “THIS IS SO STUPID!!”  But then that wouldn’t help anything, so I’ll stop throwing a fit and just show you my picture.  The one picture that DID upload from my uncooperative phone:

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I hope you can see that not only did some super great kids in our class use our numbers to make 10s again, but our total for just Thursday was 70 (our best single day so far), our weekly total was 124 (our best weekly total so far!) and our grand total is 351, which is THE LEAD FOR FIRST GRADE IN OUR COMPETITION!  Oh, and you probably can’t tell that I added 3 laps on this particular day which is my best total to date.  Wow–lots of best happening around here lately!  So technically this picture was not taken today, and the laps weren’t walked today, but there was an announcement on our school-wide news today announcing the standings so far.  Does that count?  Let’s say it does.  And I’ll do better with pictures tomorrow. 🙂

Pictures of the Day–April 16, 2015

This is day 4 of this feature, and I LOVE IT!!  I know I will always write long posts (because that’s just how I roll, plus sometimes there’s a longer story to tell), but I love how the snapshots we’re sharing give you a quick peek into life in Rm. 202.  Hopefully you feel the same! Here today’s gems:

After yesterday's picture of Emily, the group that finished the construction paper rules chart wanted to be in on the fun. Look at all of those words!

After yesterday’s picture of Emily, the group that finished the construction paper rules chart wanted to be in on the fun (see how she’s there again? 🙂 ). Look at all of those words!

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Check it out: we finished our rules today and we were SUPER proud of all of the words that we put on there! It’s a theme that has come up many times this week: how many words we have all around our room. I should post a video of tour of all of the authentic kid-writing that graces our walls. It’s pretty amazing what these little people can do!!

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Today was a Walker’s Club day, and since teachers’ laps count in our competition, I went out to do my part for Rm. 202. I was SUPER proud to be able to add 3 LAPS today! In flip-flops. And a dress. AND I ran some of it. So far I’ve only added 2 laps per week, but this week I got to put down 4 for Rm. 202’s total. YAY!! 🙂

 

Walker’s Club UPDATE–Using 10s to Add Laps

I’m sure you know about our Walker’s Club competition that is happening at Robinson for April.  Well, I’m SUPER excited to say that two weeks strong our class is in the LEAD!!!  We have done both amazing walking AND amazing adding as we figured out our totals.

This week (well really the week ends tomorrow), we used a strategy that I stole learned from my neighbor Ms. Turken to add our laps.  Instead of using the strings to make combinations of 10 (like we had many times previously), we each wrote our lap total on an index card and used these cards to create combos.  It was a great way to be able to manipulate the numbers in an easier way, and actually SEE the 10s–they made piles, after all.

Thomas and C.J. worked hard this morning to add up our mid-week total for Week 3 of the competition.  Their work looked like this (they did the card work, and I put it on the chart):

Way to go Rm. 202 kids–for walking and adding in an amazing way!! 🙂

First Grade Math Warm-Ups: Week of March 30-April 3, 2015–WALKER’S CLUB EDITION

Our math warm-ups are almost always related to what we’re working on in math.  Sometimes it’s the beginning of the unit, and so kiddos don’t have much schema yet and aren’t really sure what to do.  Later then, the warm-ups become practice of the strategies they’ve learned and are working on perfecting (or at least using more efficiently).  This week, they were even the same topic: Walker’s Club.

Let me explain…

In a nutshell, this year we started a program to help our Robinson kids stay healthy and active, as well as have productive fun at recess.  We call it Walker’s Club, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, everyone walks laps around our playground at recess.  Every kiddo (and now even teachers!) has a card to keep track of laps that is punched each time they come around.  Parents, principals, teachers and even a group of kids volunteers to be punchers, and there’s always a big buzz about how many laps kiddos have at any given time.  There are prizes called Toe Tokens that kiddos earn at certain increments along the way.  So fun!

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This picture seems like it’s from so long ago! Don’t know how I didn’t share it earlier–they seem so little, don’t they?? 🙂

Well, to make it even better, and to celebrate National Walkers’ Day (which happened on April 1), Mrs. Wilson decided to make a competition for the month of April to see who can walk the most laps.  Each grade level will have a winner, and that class will earn an extra 20 minute recess + POPSICLES!!  Needless to say, it. was. on.

Math this week, then, naturally began to revolve around Walker’s Club laps: setting goals (first it was a conversation on how to set goals) how many laps other classes were walking, how many we could walk in a day, and how many we actually walked in one day.  Oh, and strategies for how to add up long strings of numbers so we could answer each of those previous questions.

Check out what we’ve been working on this week!

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As we started out our goal-setting, we decided (ok, so I suggested) that we should figure out how many we laps we usually walk on a Walker’s Club day. We could use this number (along with some other data we collected) to set a goal for how much each kiddo would walk/run every WC day.

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After we knew how many laps was our usual, we decided to ask our first grade friends the same question. Since they were the ones we’d be competing against, we also needed to know their usual number so we could adjust ours and make a goal that would matter.  This one’s from Ms. Turken’s class.  We got some data back from other classes, too, but haven’t yet analyzed it.

I need to insert a little note here: the first time we sat down together to add up that big string of numbers, we didn’t really know what to do.

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See this?  These are all of the answers we got when we went to work with our partners to add up the data.  WOW!  All the way from 10 to 122!  We needed some practice with an efficient and ACCURATE way to put lots of numbers together.  This gave me some ideas for future work in warm-ups.

So next came the idea of finding 10s as a quick (and organized) way to put lots of numbers together.   We then added (and readded) all of our data together from our chart and Ms. Turken’s chart.  We also tried it with other random lists throughout the week (so that when we came up on Walker’s Club data again, we’d be better at using that 10s strategy):

This one was a practice problem from the morning, but we didn't quite get time to review it later in the day.

This one was a practice problem from the morning, but we didn’t quite get time to review it later in the day.

This one was actually the warm-up from Friday (when I was out of the classroom), and I showed the sub how to record the combinations of 10s.

This one was actually the warm-up from Friday (when I was out of the classroom), and I showed the sub how to record the combinations of 10s.

This practice did help us, and when we added together our first OFFICIAL Walker’s Club list of laps, we knew what to do.  The problem (which was a good one to have) was that our list included lots of numbers that we couldn’t put together to make 10s.  That’s totally cool, though, because Evan had just been working on how to put numbers together to make 20s and 30s (and other multiples of 10) on Dreambox, so he helped us figure out what to do with all of those 8s:

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When I wrote my lap number up there, I felt a little bit funny since it was so much less than my Rm. 202 friends. I was SUPER glad to know it helped us out, though, as we could use it to go with some other numbers to make a combination of 20. Whew!

Check that out: on our first day we walked (and ran) 114 laps!!  This made us feel like we were off to a tremendous start (especially since we knew Ms. Turken’s class had only done 75 on their first day) and helped us set at least a preliminary goal for ourselves: we need to walk/run at least the number we did today to stay ahead of our friends.  We’ll talk more about how many that will be in all when we come back next week, and we’ll adjust that goal as we go forward and begin to hear what the other 3 classes are doing.  And hey, no matter who wins this April competition, we ALL WIN because we’ve got new strategies in our toolbox! Plus we will all have had lots of fun and lots of fresh air and exercise!  How can anyone complain about that!?

We’ll keep you updated on our progress as we go through the month! 🙂