Math Under the Sea: The Green Ribbon Worm

Critical Thinking.  It takes work.  
Collaboration.  It takes practice.
Together, we are better.


We practiced these skills as a crew recently.  In our worm study we came across a green ribbon worm that lives on the ocean floor and can be as long as 100 feet.

I posed these questions:

Well, I suggested that we use something we've learned about this year.  Non-standard ways to measure things.  For instance, our bodies...
We know that 1 foot = 12 inches.
How if the average 1st grader is 4 feet tall, how many inches long would that be?

They went to work. They got a feel for how many inches long they are.  And an idea of how long this worm would be.


Time to get a visual on this.
They know that correct measurement has to be end to end! 
So they became ribbon worms!


We had 16 children at school that day. 
We began adding the 4ft. of children together.  And we determined that 16 children would be only 64 ft. long! 

They were funny here...they decided more children would have to lay down end to end, but they only had 16.  Where would they get more children?  

Finally, one of them realized that they could move the children from of the front of the line to the end and keep going that way.  So fun to watch them puzzle this out.  I stayed out of it!

These are the kind of critical thinking math problems that the children love.  Authentic.  Fun.  Collaborative.

I challenge you to do something like this at home.
When you do, share it with us. We can learn from each other.

Worms! Part of the Garden System

Spring has sprung!  Time to get back to thinking about the garden system.  Every healthy garden needs worms and today we began our study of these awesome creatures.

To introduce this new Expedition I set out containers of "soil" and told the children we would be "scientists" today and our job was to take a close look at soil using our scientific tools. 
(popsicle sticks:)

EEKKK! Soon the squeals began as the children found the worms hidden in each tub.  Yes, we will be studying worms!

Then it was time to assemble the worm farm and take observation notes in our scientific journals.  We will be doing experiments with the earthworms and we will observe the worm farm daily to watch the tunneling begin.  

What Do You Know About Geometry?

We are starting to learn more about the shapes in our world, a unit of study that the children always enjoy.

Before we began, I wanted to know what background knowledge the students already had around this subject.
So I asked them:

It was clear that we would need to take some time on this journey and we have begun. 

After the second day of study, I connected our new learning to something called a Padlet. Here we can post our learning along the way.  Very cool!

Created with Padlet

Learning about Reading and Writing through Author Studies

Studying the craft of writing by looking closely at an author's life and craft is a wonderful way to grow readers and writers. This is a huge undertaking but always so worthwhile!  Here is a peek into how we went about studying these authors...

1.  Lots of prep work during our study of Jan Brett in December.  I did the study, they learned from me.  This is how I teach...first I do, then they do!

2.  I collected books from these authors and immersed them in a number of books from each.  Then the children picked the author they wanted to study. I continued modeling by studying the author Ezra Jack Keets with them each day before they went off to do the work in their groups.

3. Each day I gave them a different task to work on.  These included:  

• Reading the books for enjoyment.
• Noticing text features and common threads between the author's books.
• Researching their authors by reading book jackets, reading author blogs, and watching videos on the web.  We safely researched by using the kid friendly search engine KidRex.  

Finally, the children were given 4 options for their final presentations: 

1.  Creating a ShowMe 

2.  Making a video

3.  Developing a chart

4.  Writing a letter to their author 

Each group then presented to the whole crew.  This is as important as the study...learning how to create and collaborate in groups and communicate clearly to an audience. 

Our budding artist Ziva enjoyed writing a letter to Eric Carle!

Ask your child how they presented their information!  Each of them grew as learners through this experience!  

More Math: Counting Around the Circle and Using Manipulatives

 For months we have been sitting in a circle to practice counting.  At first we practiced counting by ones up and back.  Then by 2's, 5's and 10's.  This led to skip counting, going from 10's to 5's to 1's.  Very tricky business for some of us.  This was prep work for counting coins and learning about place value.

This past week we did 2 different count around the circle activities that helped us practice skip counting but also see patterns in place value.  The first time I gave each child one of these: 

The long is "ten", the cube is "one".  These are the base ten blocks we use.  

We practiced counting by tens and ones and we came up with a total number.  I scribed these numbers as we went along to show visually how the place value was changing. 
Then we counted the same pieces the other way around the circle, and finally we swapped pieces and counted again.

We discovered many things, including that our total sum was always the same regardless and we began to notice more patterns in place value.   The second time we did this activity I passed out dimes, nickels and pennies and we did the same process.  I think this is helping us learn place value in a fun and interactive way!

 In addition, as we counted the 3 different ways, I highlighted the movement on a number grid.  You can see the 3 different colors I used to show that we counted using different pathways but every time we ended with 113.  They loved this!  

Here are a few more pictures showing the crew using math manipulatives to help them solve problems.