Dear Parents,
It was a hot day in the classroom, but I feel like we started some real work today and wanted to show you what that looked like.
Until I've had a chance to communicate with parents and get media releases, I'm doing my best to avoid face shots, except where I've had those conversations. At the beginning of a new year, I feel like it's good to be clear that I try to respect various family comfort levels about online privacy (For example, I never publish student names with their faces and configure this blog to be as low visibility as possible while remaining public). Please do let me know if I ever publish a photo you're uncomfortable with being on the blog.
Below you see an example of an exercise that asks students about numbers relevant to them (their age, their birthday, the number of people in their family, how many pets they have, and how many students are in our class).
I handed out a variety of manipulatives and asked students to show me those numbers in various ways. This is a simple exercise that lets students become more familiar with the materials in the classroom:
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| Two sided counters and pumpkin seeds |
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| Buttons, and checking each other's work |
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| Marbles tend to roll, so are best in lids |
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| Teddy bears |
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| Cards |
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| Jewels |
Some students had an easier time than others (June 2 was a lot easier than December 29). Some students got excited and started to add all their numbers together. We consolidated our learning at the end of the lesson by talking over some tricks to counting bigger numbers, like 21, that don't fit on fingers
Here are the tips we talked about today:
--Holding the number in your head and counting up or down.
--Patterned counting by twos or fives.
--Using the manipulatives by moving them once they've been counted.
--Grouping the manipulatives to help patterned counting.
These are all simple ideas, but they are so useful when counting, representing, adding, and subtracting. You might even see the beginning glimmers of multiplication strategies in grouping the numbers. We'll keep working at this, but I'm happy that so many students seem excited by math concepts.
Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan
P.S. I'm totally bringing in popsicles tomorrow.
