Have a great holiday everyone and see you all in 2019!
Month: December 2018
A Windy Mystery
Today’s mystery was quite interesting. In it, Pam sabotaged Wendy’s Windmill but claimed it was knocked over by the wind from an open window. After we read the case’s title, “The Case of the Foul Play at the Fair”, we discussed how it was a silly title because Foul and Fair are antonyms. That lead us to talk about other ones, like Junie’s hot and cold or Niki’s up and down. We even discussed how right can have two antonyms, left and wrong, since right has two different meanings. We noticed that there was actually a Sherlock Brown class that was actually pretty similar, which we thought was funny. Yianni was wondering if we could make our own windmills, which we enjoyed making with our gear set. What an unexpectedly rich story.
Our math problem was pretty tricky (they noticed that we had 2 bonus problems, so it was tough indeed). We started by figuring out how many graham crackers Max would need to make 6 gingerbread houses if each house took 5 crackers. Anja started by counting on her fingers and counted 1-5, 1 (for 1 house), 6-10, 2 (for the second house), etc. Teddy skip counted by 5 six times, which worked pretty well. Timo decided to use a picture, drawing 6 houses and putting 5 lines under each to stand for the crackers. No matter how they solved it, pretty much everyone arrived at the conclusion that Max needed 30 crackers. We then worked as a class figuring out how many boxes of graham crackers he’d need, and then went on to find out how much it would cost to buy the graham crackers.
The rest of our work was pretty exceptional. We started making chromatography snowflakes; Paolo made two attempts,, since his first one had too many colors and merged into just brown, while Gia worked to figure out how to make teal on the paper. Max loved the way we extended the coding mouse activity, which moved to recording their programming on a tracking sheet. It’s amazing seeing how they’re growing.
Don’t forget, we are going to the bank tomorrow. Also, just announced, Thursday is holiday dress down day. You can wear red and green, holiday pajamas, whatever gets you in the holiday spirit. Please send in a bag tomorrow, as we are sending home snowpants and boots tomorrow.
Ready for the show
Today we practiced our songs and our hand motions, so we’re ready to go tomorrow. Make sure you’re at the Bridge by 9:45 in your holiday attire (pants, collared shirts, dresses or skirts). Our day was made brighter with Ms. Steph’s visit, which was a blast. We managed to solve a mystery involving a stolen jacket. The jacket was stolen while Peter was in the dentist’s office, and we all thought that Sam Sage was lying about not being there, but Timo pointed out that we needed to catch him lying, not just suspect him. Teddy thought it would be easiest to check with Sam’s parents, which was actually a pretty great idea. However, Niki realized that Sam talked about a dentist’s office, while Peter only asked him about being at the doctor’s office. Tove was immediately suspicious, wondering how he knew they were at the dentist. Anja exclaimed that Sam must have seen him at the dentist, which means he was there, which means HE DID STEAL THE JACKET! Great job everyone. We’ve also been reading Zooey and Sassafrass, a Monarch award nominee about a little girl that is a vet for magical animals. In the chapter today, Zooey found a baby dragon and the chapter ended with her wondering what to feed the dragon. We made predictions. Gia noticed that the subtitle of the book was dragons and marshmallows, so she predicted marshmallows. Juniper knew that in myths, dragons eat people, so she predicted people. Sokrates reasoned that Godzilla is a bearded dragon, so this dragon would eat fruit and crickets like Godzilla does. Rebecca remembered in How to Train Your Dragon Toothless ate fish, so she thought fish. I can’t tell who is right, but I love all the reasoning happening here. We also made cards to decorate the rows for tomorrow for each class. Yianni wanted to put a Santa on their card, while Max made sure to add a Merry Christmas, just to add to the holiday spirit. Paolo put oranges and ice skating on his, just to show a few of his favorite holiday activities. Make sure to check them out tomorrow! See everyone then!
The Price of Water
First and foremost, please make sure that your child is on time tomorrow, since we are leaving before 9 to go to the Bridge to practice the holiday program. Please arrive promptly at 8:45 so everyone can use the restroom and we can start on time.
We had a very moving morning, as we read Water Princess by Susan Verde, about a girl growing up in Burkina Faso that had to walk miles every day just to get water. Yianni was touched by how hard that must be, while Timo couldn’t believe that this is still happening. Juniper was really inspired by how the book was happy and sad at the same time, since Princess Gie Gie had a hard life, but was still joyful and danced. Paolo wondered if we could send her water that we had, so we are going to be thinking about ways that we can help out those people that don’t have access to clean water. To help with that, we brainstormed different questions about water. Tove wondered where water comes from in the first place, while Teddy wondered what was in water and what it was made of. Gia focused on wondering why some water is salty and why we can’t drink some water. I think that, through all of these investigations, we’ll find some great ways to help people like Princess Gie Gie.
Our explorations were very productive, as we made decorations, brainstormed the questions I already discussed, and used our new coding mouse (which is INCREDIBLY popular). Max enjoyed designing the maze and thinking about how to program the mouse, while Sokrates pointed out how the cards helped him plan the way the mouse would move. Anja worked to build a ‘snowman palace’ out of clay, with Rebecca helping pound out a flat floor in clay. Juniper contributed a snowman to help round out the whole scene. It was a blast seeing the classroom come to life and get in the holiday spirit.
Don’t forget to be here and ready to go tomorrow morning. No bank visit, by the way.
Following our own stars
I’m sure eventually I’ll get used to the class being amazing mathematicians; it isn’t today. Sokrates asked about the problem of the day as soon as he walked in, so here we go. Timo had $10 to spend on presents, spent $2 on his mom, $3 on his dad, and is spending the rest on Vago. Max counted on his fingers and used a white board, while Timo figured out he could represent the problem by solving 10-2-3. Gia admitted that she didn’t get it, but she checked in with Tove and Rebecca who walked her through their work. After watching them, Gia did her own work on a board and announced that now she got it. After everyone decided that Timo had $5 left, the bonus asked how many $2 books Timo could buy for Vago. Sokrates was torn, but he was sure it couldn’t be two books, because then he would have money left over, but Yianni argued that he wouldn’t be able to get another book for just a dollar, so he must have only got 2 books. This was another fascinating discussion that really got the whole class thinking. Great job everyone!
We also solved another mystery today (which makes us 3/3 this week). What was especially exciting was that Anja noticed in the picture that the bag of peanuts should had writing on it that started with Ps, and Niki reminded us that it should have said “Fall Festival”, so we knew that he was the pickpocket. With that in mind, Tove decided to draw the “Plenty Peanuts” bag, since it was our most important clue.
We wrapped up our day with a discussion and reading of “The North Star” by Peter H. Reynolds with Ms. Anna W’s class. It was a fantastically beautiful book that we will be working around for a while. As a start to our exploration, we read about the constellations in the book and decided to make our own out of things we love and would follow on our path. Juniper and Barry worked together to make a star field full of Pisces and a flying unicorn. Paolo used a book from our classroom library to get ideas for constellations that are in the night sky. I can’t wait to talk more about this book tomorrow!
Deep Dive
Normally, I like to give an overview of the entire day, but today is a little different. While we did a number of amazing things (like designing cities and working on our super secret magical ornaments), I was absolutely blown away by their work on the problem of the day and wanted to focus just on that today. Let’s go.
We started with an already challenging problem, with Teddy wanting to make 3 cookies for each of his 4 friends. Sokrates started by asking me to reread the question, just to make sure that it was just for Teddy’s friends, not for Teddy too. Teddy immediately started skip counting by 3s, as he knew each friend would get three cookies. Anja counted on her fingers, going up 3 four times, but it got a little hard to count at the end. Max wanted to draw it out on the board, and Rebecca helped him out by reminding him that they needed 4 friends, not just 3 as he thought at first. Niki drew hers out and realized she could just represent the friends with Xs, instead of drawing out people. Juniper thought at first the answer was 7, but she was comparing her work with Yianni and they worked out that they needed to count to three 4 times, not just add them together, so they ended up deciding it was 12. Honestly, this was impressive enough, as far as mathematical reasoning for K/1 students goes, especially since they did all of this independently. But, since they were doing great, I read them the bonus question. Sadly, after Teddy finished baking, he remembered that there were 2 more friends he wanted to give cookies to. If he couldn’t make any more cookies but wanted to share them evenly, how many would each friend get. Timo estimated it would be about 2, since he figured they would need to get less than the 3 they originally got because there are more people to share with (this is a fascinating bit of mathematical reasoning). Paolo thought we could check it out by first drawing the now 6 friends Teddy’s going to be sharing with. Tove reasoned that we would then pass out the 12 cookies we figured out from the previous answer to the friends. After we did one round, Gia saw that we had passed out 6 cookies and could go another round. In the end, it turned out that each of Teddy’s friends got 2 cookies. What an incredible mathematical journey and such wonderful young mathematicians.
Starting our ornaments
Since I couldn’t post yesterday, it’s an extra long post. Buckle up!
Our problems of the day are going great. Yesterday, we started with 10 ornaments in a box. We then tried to figure out how many were left after Rebecca hung up 3. Yianni made sure to explain that we were taking ornaments out of the box, not adding more, so the number would go down to 7, not up to 13. After that discussion went well, I challenged them with a bonus questions. After Andrew took out some ornaments, the class was challenged to figure out how many were on the tree. The class hopped right to it, but Max interrupted some people and pointed out that we weren’t finding out how many were left in the box (which was what everyone initially thought we were solving), but how many were on the tree, which meant we needed to add Rebecca’s and Andrew’s together. What a tricky problem!
In today’s problem, we were seeing whether my class or Ms. Anna’s class had donated more books. This was tricky, but Yianni pointed out that we have to count the classes separately, not all together. Timo added that the 2 books Gia and Tatum donated were the same amount, so it only mattered that Yianni donated more than Alanna. Then, to take it to the next level, we had to find out how many more books were needed to collect 20 books in all. Teddy showed how to count them all together, and Niki explained that we needed to count up from 17 to 20. Max and Paolo worked together to count it and then drew 3 more boxes into our picture to check our work. Everyone did a fantastic job working together to solve these tricky problems.
Yesterday we started decorating our classroom by drawing winter themes on our stick for the classroom. Rebecca drew a Christmas tree, while Sokrates added ornaments and Christmas colors. Teddy drew a brown snowman, while Anja talked about using a stencil and how much easier that would be. Paolo discussed lemons for Christmas, which I didn’t know anything about. We also started our Christmas ornaments, which should be a fun treat!
Today we focused on our explorations and they went great. After reading about Gustav Klimt and how he used patterns, we practiced integrating patterns into our drawings, like Gia putting one in her puppy’s spots. Anja made a pattern with marker then crayon then marker and so on, while Rebecca pointed out that they could add chalk into the pattern too. In the rest of the explorations time, Junie decided that she wanted to play math games first, so she went around and found people that wanted to play and organized a game. Tove decided she enjoyed writing her name on the board, as it made it easier for her to see what she still needed to do.
Finally, we had a blast at the library yesterday, as our learning continues to get deeper and more intentional. Tove was thrilled to find a dot book and offered to read it to Rebecca. Timo couldn’t decide between two books right away, so he skimmed them both to see which was better. Niki showed her classmates where all the Christmas books were, which was a pretty popular area. What a productive visit.
Whew. What a productive pair of days!
