I Like to Move It!

This week I've found my kids to be rather antsy. The weather is changing, we are between. Halloween and Thanksgiving, whatever excuse fits- they need to move.

I love Go Noodle. Love, love, love it!  It's perfect for when it's too cold to go outside for a four stop obstacle course or a quick recess. The songs are fun, the track and field events are energizing, and on the whole Go Noodle gets kids moving and gives me a bit more focus time afterwards.   And while Go Noodle can't conquer curriculum as much as I would like, it's a great jump start into creative thinking!

Part of our math experience for the week was exploring arrays. Students built array posters, they drew arrays, they created arrays with counters, and, most actively, became arrays.

Using their dry erase boards, we headed to the open area in the Fine Arts Wing to spread out in arrays. With 18 Thinkers in math class, we were easily able to build arrays for 18, 16, 15, 14, 12, 10, 9, 8, 6, and 4.  Yes, we threw in a few prime numbers as well.

Giving the kids the go ahead to actually be crawling around on the floor? Let's just say they have quite the solid understanding of arrays.

This week also brought out the food chain. Literally. We started by playing a food chain game using pre-determined and created food chains. It was a nice introduction. Then we kicked it up a notch. Each Thinker was given a mini poster with the name of an living thing on the top.  Their job was to use the resources we had in the room to create a poster about that living thing.  Basic needs, habitat, and adaptations were required (and even though we hadn't studied adaptations yet, well, they figured it out and gave themselves the front loading for next week!)

Them we got to move. The living things, while the kids thought they were random, we're carefully plotted parts of four food chains. Their job? Figure our how to create those chains. This got them moving and talking and problem solving and reasoning, and most importantly, learning!

There are so many ways to make movement an everyday part of learning, the more ways we use, the better!

See. Think. Wonder.

This is another fantastic Thinking Routine.  In lower grades, they call it see-think-wonder.  In upper grades, we often call it observe-think-question.

What do you see?

And that's exactly what we did.

As we were readying to do some close reading, I remembered an old game we used to play at camp.  You know the one I'm talking about?  The one where one person stands in front of the group for a minute, and the group has to "memorize" that person.  Then, the person steps out of site of the group and changes ONE thing.  Just one.  They return to the group, and it's the groups job to try and notice (see/observe) the difference.

Well, it did wonders for helping the kids start to NOTICE details in their reading.

It was a short, but extremely engaging way to kick off a new reading unit!

Gridding the Classroom - Part 2: Geography

My student photographer actually
got a decent shot of me!

The start of our map.

As a part of our mathematical morning that fated day after Halloween, we extended our math play into geography, which was a natural connection to our PYP unit - Where We Are in Place and Time.

We compared the grid lines on our floor to the longitude and latitude lines on a globe an map.  From there, we used coordinate pairs to determine where to add features on our map - including natural and human characteristics.

Students used chalk to add features - buildings, rivers, etc.

As we drew, and our map grew, we transferred that information to a grid map on the Promethean board which made it simpler to print out maps for those that were absent. (the rest of the Thinkers drew it on graph paper.)

The last thing we did that day was travel from location to location on the map.  Simple, right?  Nope. Not when you're using directions (N-S-W-E) and distance (1 block, 2 blocks, etc)  Definitely not simple, but definitely, DEFINITELY fun!

One of the best tools we have!

A student map in progress - our dry erase
boards double as writing surfaces!

Adding roads was a team effort!

A completed map!

Moving from place to place.

Gridding the Classroom Part 1

They walked in and this is what they saw.
The looks on their faces were priceless!

The day after Halloween in an Elementary school is never a fun one.  The kids are too fidgety, too tired, too "hungover" from all the sugar and the likely late night trick-or-treating.  This year, instead of "fighting" it, I went with it. 

We turned the classroom into a giant grid, and spent the entire morning "playing" math.  And geography.  And reading.  And even a little writing.  It was, as some of the kids said, "the best math day ever!"

Let's see…. we covered columns and rows, coordinate pairs, reading a grid map, creating a map (post for another day!) arrays, median, mode, range, directions, and distances.  I try to make movement a regular part of the day, though it doesn't always happen.  This time, though, the physical movement helped make a lot more sense of the data concepts that seem so arbitrary on paper!

Of course we had to start the day playing…. 

Then the kids walked around a bit, before
we moved into columns and rows - and moved
in each!

Moving like rows…..

Setting up for graphing - favorite Halloween Candy!

Flipping the boards to find the median.

We also used the grid to sort geometric figures
 by number of sides.

Then, of course, we had to calculate how
big the grid was in the first place!

Students came up with a variety of ways
to show how they solved it.

This was a great way to practice the "over up" of
coordinate pairs.