Happy Tuesday!

  

Today we were practicing + and - 1 with 20 frames!  

Enjoy some pictures from Jean....a dental hygienist who came to teach us all about our teeth!  

Oops. I snuck in one more picture about +1 and -1. Cason made a great connection about this after he read Pete the Cat and his Four Groovy Buttons. In this story, Pete loses one button at a time and they talk about the minus symbol! 

So one of our new favorite things is to play school. They LOVE it!

The 100th Day of School!

Today our math problem was to build a chain that was 100 links long. Phew! It was a great problem. I figured that only a few students would figure out how to make 10 groups, such as the group above. Even though the other groups counted by 1, they did have discussions about counting by 5s and/or 2s...they just had trouble using these ideas when actually making the chains. 

We talked about +1 today! Here is our +1 tower! 

We were wondering if 100 licks would get to the bottom of a Dum Dum sucker. Hmmm.....

Happy Friday!

I'm hoping you've seen the post about our big math project that evolved last week. Well, some more fun times have come up since then. Jaxon was invited to show K01 how to make his fans! 

K03 visited us on Friday afternoon! They're up to something....not sure what though :) 

Our math wall now says, 'How did you do it?' Here are some recent explanations that were added....

Most Amazing Math!!!

I've been taking South Dakota Counts through the State of South Dakota. It is an amazing program. The coaches from our district absolutely astound me. I've learned so much on top of learning AVMR. I feel like I've grown as a math teacher and can't even believe my own eyes somedays. 

Are you in for a long post and a lot of explaining? Oh good! Here we go. So, as you know, we had inside recess all week. :( Today we were playing inside and the kids were coloring/making art projects. Our little Jaxon started the whole thing. Have you ever seen those little fans that unfold and you can fan yourself? Kids love those. Well Jaxon knows how to make them and then glue them so they stay together. The ENTIRE class was doing this. They were so into it. 

When we had to clean up they were saying, "Can we make those for all of the kindergarten kids? Can we sell them? Yeah! We could sell them!" I started thinking and was wondering if I could turn what was supposed to be reading time into a crazy math problem/project. So I quickly wrote the above problem down. I told them they could use any tools, work alone or with friends to solve it. 

I was beyond thrilled. This wasn't new. It was hard. No one looked confused or puzzled. They got right to work. Just look below. 

This group used counters. 

These friends used counters and drew tallies. 

This group had an interesting strategy. They were drawing pairs. I asked them why. They couldn't really explain that. I think it kind of 'happened' by mistake. They did explain that each numeral, "1, 2, 3, 4..." stood for one child. Then they counted the total. 

These friends used 10 towers. We recently discovered that these towers were made of 10. Before now, we had just been calling them towers. They need to discover the importance of 10 (a decade number), on their own. Do you see the 20 and 23? Wow. 

I had two friends who explained to me that 20 and 20 is 40. 3 more is 43. These friends clearly have developed a solid place value sense. Great! 

So once we were done solving....we asked, "How did you do it?" Look below. I recorded some of their thoughts as they shared. Notice, I would not record, "I just knew it."

Now it was time to make the fans. I asked the children how we could keep them organized so we know exactly when we had 43. Aryn said we could do groups of 5 or 10 (wow) and the class shouted, "10!" Cale was our "10 captain." He let us know exactly when we were done. 

That's it! We'll deliver our beautiful fans to K01 and K03 tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed this as much as we did! 

Written and Illustrated by...

I should mention (about the post below) that our newsbook says "K02's Newsbook. Written and illustrated by K02."

Today I noticed Cason had made a front cover for his story (during writing) and he wrote, "Written and illustrated by Cason."

Haha! I love it when they do stuff like this. They are so creative! They do not need written prompts from teachers to come up with things. I suppose that's just my opinion, but I wanted to share.

Have a great night!!!!

Happy Thursday!

We have been working on retelling for awhile now. Fairy tales are great and familiar stories for you to help your child learn how to retell. We read, Jack and the Beanstalk and then wrote the most important parts. The kids were very busy adding extra leaves to our giant and his beanstalk this morning. 

These two pictures show us during our morning meeting. We are doing the newsbook which is a fun way to share with each other. Today we visited about what we did last night at home. Then volunteers share what their partner did with the whole group. I record one of the answers and then we illustrate it! Very fun.