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.