Collecting Data

In class yesterday, we collected data using a tally chart.  We went around a circle and asked all of our classmates a question and collected their answers.  It was an interesting experience.  Today we are going to talk about graphing that data and thinking about which questions worked the best to make a pictograph.  Questions that have too many different answers or not enough make it harder to make a good pictorial representation.

Students enjoyed feeling part of the process and I am looking forward to their creation of their pictographs today.  It is another way I want them to actually use something instead of just do a worksheet.  It definitely takes more time to check if they understand, but in the end I think it is sinking in better and they are more completely understanding what we are doing.  It would be fun to see them take that knowledge home to collect data around the house and graph it this summer.

Summer Data and Graphing Ideas:

• Temperature
• Plant growth
• Rain Fall with a collection device
• Sunny, Cloudy, Rainy Days
• How many times you eat each dinner
• How many times you visit each friend

There are so many possibilities and ways that students can record and write about their summer experiences while keeping their mathematical brains working.  Just stop and ask them to make generalizations about their data to see what is the least, most, and how different things compare.

Real World Knowledge

I am often frustrated by coin worksheets as they often copy very poorly and the amount of coins that have different backs are alarming.  I know that skill needs to be taught, but for my final coin assessment I want the students to be counting and manipulating real money.  Students were given a variety of amounts of money that they could move around and flip over to see if they had the real world skills involved in counting money.

I really hope to bring more of this kind of assessment into my classroom both now and in the future.  It is much more rewarding as a teacher to watch students manipulate money then to put stars on a paper for a grade.  I have a much better idea of who will be successful on this skill in the real world.  Students worked hard and most of them did well.  We did have a few students who have some nickel and quarter confusion.

If you know any tricks to help kids keep the coins apart, please teach your kids and have them come in and share.  This is a skill that always appears to be something that I think will be easier then it ends up being.  I am always looking for new ways to help students take on new knowledge.  We will keep pressing on to finish all of our skills by the end of the year.  We still have time, graphing, and measurement to finish assessing.

Rolling a Story

Last Friday, we practiced our writing with Rory's Story Cubes.  The cubes are designed to be a story telling game, but we used them to provide us with inspiration to write sentences.  We are going to take a break from our writing for a week or so and really work on sentence structure, punctuation, and parts of speech.  We were practicing writing complete sentences and also identifying the nouns in the sentences that we wrote.

Story cubes are one fun way to encourage writing and sharing of writing.  It would be a great idea to find some fun way for your student to practice writing at home this summer.  It could be writing letters to a relative or a pen pal.  It could be in a diary or a blank book.  There are many fun ways to encourage writing, but whatever it is, it should be done in a positive way.  The most influential key to success is having a positive attitude about your writing.  Writers that love to write are more likely to become successful writers.

I look forward to pulling out the cubes again and practicing this along with our parts of speech to encourage creative writing and on the spot thinking.  I hope to inspire all of my students to love their writing and to be confident about what they write.

Taking Notes and Making Changes

Being flexible enough to change your opinion is one of the most important skills a young person can have.  When students dig their feet in and refuse to accept new ideas, they turn off their ability to learn.  As I have watched students play and edit their games, I have seen students scrap their ideas and rewrite which is an amazing ability.  During design work this week, it was mandatory that the designer had their notebook out to make notes and many were editing their plans as they went.  They were either changing rules to make it less confusing or they were rewriting ideas to make them more fun.

This has been a rewarding experience, but it is one that we will be wrapping up at the end of next week.  We have other things that we need to move on and explore and do.  We will be taking Friday afternoon next week to do game presentations and exploration.  Students will be able to share their ideas, their successes, and their failures on the way to success.  It should be a good conversation and fun for the kids to see that everything doesn't always work correctly the first time.

On another note, I taught the students a very simple abstract game that they could probably teach you at home.  The game is called Santorini.  It is played on a five by five square grid.  Each player has two builder pieces and you need quite a few building material pieces.  The object is to get your builder to stand on top of a stack of three pieces.  On your turn, one of your builders must move one space in any direction.  Then that same builder must build a tower piece on a space that is adjacent to him in any direction.  A builder may climb one level up on his turn or jump down as many levels as he wants.  As a defensive action a builder may build a fourth layer on any tower called the dome which closes off that space to movement or building for the rest of the game.  The first player to get a builder on the top of a stack of three pieces is the winner.

We have played with counters and unifex cubes at school, but you could use pennies, scrabble tiles, legos, or anything flat to be the building pieces at home.  The kids are getting pretty good at it and it is good for their spatial thinking.  I was defeated twice in the past two days by students playing this game.

Researching Coins

Today we spent some time exploring the United States Mint website.  They have a site for kids that talks about the history of the coins and has some great history about the state quarter program and the presidential dollar coin program.  Students were asked to write about the circulation coins if they are still having trouble with counting coins, or if they felt confidant then they were researching the history of our country that has been pictured on coins.  This was a great way to connect our social studies objectives about history with our need to learn about our coins.  The website is www.usmint.gov/kids.

Students enjoyed the chance to take their learning in their own direction.  I am working hard on stressing the importance of extending their own learning and "making their education their own."  I want to empower these learners to be curious enough to come back later or at home to learn more about what we are working on.  We will get into the math tomorrow, but today was a nice day to read and report about what they found.  They should have a great fact about a coin, a state, or a president to share with you.

It is amazing that we are down to the last 42 days of school and there is still so much I want to give every student.  We will be racing to do as much as we can everyday and students will benefit greatly by being at school everyday ready to learn.  I have some fun things planned, but we still have a lot of core things to cover before I send them off to be amazing third graders.  Thanks for sending them with a smile!

Practicing Money

On Friday, we spent some time doing a group activity that included counting coins and multiplication.  Students rolled two ten sided dice, multiplied the two numbers, wrote the math fact on a white board, and then came up to a table and counted out the money that they needed to make that number.  It was fun to see them up and moving around while counting money.  It was also enjoyable to see them work together and help each other as they worked on counting coins.

We will be flying through several topics at the end of the year including counting coins, telling analog time, measurement,  interpreting graphs, and a bit more geometry that we didn't cover earlier this year.  Each topic will be restricted to a couple of weeks or less, so it will be imperative that students practice at home if needed following our classroom instruction.

Our Noetic Problem Solving Challenge will be tomorrow, April 19th.  Students don't need to do anything special as this will be done during our normal math time.  I would suggest a good night's sleep and a good breakfast as concentration is going to be the most important skill to success.  Students will need to read and interpret the problems in order to solve them.  I look forward to seeing how everyone does.

Noetic Problems of the Day:

1.  We will be free writing three days this week.  We will be working on our game rules three days this week.  We will not be working on anything on Saturday or Sunday.  How many days will we do both game writing and free writing?

2. There were 30 spelling words.  Tom got 16 right the first time.  He fixed half of the rest of them before he turned them in.  How many words did Tom get wrong?



3.  Jennifer needed a hand that equaled 19 to win the game.  Which card should she discard?  (Hint: She can only discard one card.  The Ace is worth one point.)

Noetic Problems

Noetic Problems of the Day:


1.  Noah wants to pick cards that add up to 22.  How many combinations can you find?  You can use each card one time.  (I found three different ways.)


2.  Dad bought 32 screws to fix things around the house.  He used half of the screws to fix the deck.  He used six screws to hang a sign on the mailbox.  How many screws did he have left?

3.  If June 5 is on a Monday, What day is June 17th?

The Giant Summary

Today we set out to try to summarize our month of reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.  It was a tall undertaking to summarize a novel that has multiple story lines.  I really enjoyed reading this book this year with this class.  Each year I have taught, I have enjoyed a different book the most.  This will be the book that I remember the most from this year.  The students listened very intently and had great insight into what was happening.

We spent some time today writing down all of our thought about what made up the most important events in the story.  We took some suggestions and stuck some notes on the board to make a rough summary of events.  Following a great discussion, I allowed them all to stick their notes on the board and now I can't bear to take it down.  I should have stuck them on the wall instead of the board.

It is truly awesome to watch students move from the lighter reading of series books into novels that can evoke such strong emotions and make great connections with characters.  I still remember some of the characters from books that I read with my mom and my sister at that age.  I remember being read to until I was in 5th grade even though I was a great reader myself.  I don't know if there is a greater memory that you can make than to share a novel as a family.  I know it is one of my favorite things to do with my classroom "family."  If you can carve out the time, I would highly recommend reading a novel with and to your children no matter how old they are or how good a reader they have become.

Noetic Problems of the Day:

1.  It took the Rats of NIMH 40 trips to take the seed to Thorn Valley.  Each day they could take eight trips to the Valley to drop off seeds.  The first trip was on Friday, June 17th.  What was the day and the date when they made the last trip?  (Hint: Make a chart to make sure you didn't make a mistake)

2.  Twenty-eight rats signed up to work the plows in Thorn Valley.  If it takes seven rats to pull a plow and each rat works on no more than one team, how many plows are the rats able to use to plant their fields?

3.  It took the rats 45 minutes to plant a small field.  They had to plant three fields today.  They took a 30 minute break between each field.  They finished planting the third field at 11:00 a.m.  What time did they start planting the first field.  (Hint:  Draw a picture or diagram to show the periods of time)  (I know this one is tricky and we haven't practiced this very much.)

Play Testing Our Games

Play Testing Day 1:

We began play testing our games today.  Why are we doing this?  I am using this design project for a couple language arts standards.  We are working on writing formats, informational "how to do it" writing, and working on what it takes to revise our ideas.  By having to go back and change our work, students are learning how to constantly evaluate their sentence structure so their instructions are clear.

Students do not need to have created a physical game to do the work necessary in class.  They will be continuing to write rules for their game concept whether they have a game or not.  On days where we get all of our work done, we will have time to test and revise games as long as the game designer is updating their rules with clarifications and new ideas.  I am hoping to spark a desire to work hard and be tough on our own writing as we have fun designing and finding things that don't work.

The kids are enjoying so far and I love being able to see the sparks of creativity and the motivation to make their writing better to help others understand their game.

Noetic Problems of the Day:


1.  How many triangles do you see?  Remember that a triangle is any shape with three sides.  How can you make an organized list to make sure you see all of the triangles?

2. Mr. Montgomery gave each of his 26 students 3 carrots.  Carrots come in packages of twenty carrots.  How many packages did he have to buy to make sure he had enough carrots for everyone?

3. I had five different weights (40 pounds, 20 pounds, 15 pounds, 10 pounds, and 5 pounds).  I have to use each weight once.  How can I put them on the scale to make sure both sides are equal?

Noetic Math Camp

Noetic Learning Math Challenge

I am so excited that we have been allowed to join the Noetic Learning Math Challenge.  The Noetic challenge is a problem solving math test.  The questions are geared more towards logic and even reading comprehension rather than straight computational problems.  This assessment is a twenty question paper and pencil assessment that we will be taking on April 19th.  It is given across the country and many of the school that participate are the best private schools and schools geared towards high academic achievement.  I found out about this challenge during my attendance to the Michigan Association for Gifted Education conference.

We have been practicing problem solving techniques all year, but we are going to spend a week refreshing many strategies used on multi-step problems and logic based problems.  I will also be placing a problem for the day on the blog that can be solved for a clip up in the morning.  I really think we have a chance to have many students earn recognition through this assessment.

I will be sending a permission slip home tomorrow that will ask for permission to publish your child's name if they earn recognition for their achievement.  There will also be certificates for everyone who participates and some students may earn medals.  You can see my students past achievements at the following links.

http://www.noetic-learning.com/mathcontest/results/2015Spring/grade2_honor.htm#MI

http://www.noetic-learning.com/mathcontest/results/2015Spring/grade2_mention.htm#MI

http://www.noetic-learning.com/mathcontest/results/2014Spring/grade2.jsp

http://www.noetic-learning.com/mathcontest/results/2014Spring/grade2_mention.htm#MI

I look forward to more names being placed on this site this year along with our goal of making it as a team.  Last year was the first year that they did a team award and my class missed by one question because one of our best students was sick the week we had left to do the test.  I hope this year we can earn the first team honor for Davison in this challenge.

It is always fun watching students unlock the secrets to solving problems that they didn't think they could solve.  I love seeing their abstract ways to solve problems and I love seeing them begin to be critical and double check their work.  The problems this week are not mandatory, but of course they will help if they spend some time thinking through these solutions.

Noetic Problems of the Day:

1.  There were 25 slices of pizza at the party.  Albert took three pieces of pizza for himself and two pieces of pizza for his friend Sally.  Mr. Smith took half of the remaining pieces of pizza for his classroom.  Sue and Donald shared the rest of the pizza that was left.  How many pieces of pizza did Donald have?  (Hint: Draw a picture or make an organized chart)

2.  Everyday she goes out to eat, Mrs. July purchases an apple for $1.00, a glass of ice tea for $1.00, and a sandwich for $4.00.  If she spend $30.00 this week, how many days did she go out to eat?  (Hint: You may want to make an organized list)