Windsor firefighters visited our school to talk about fire safety and fire prevention, which we also incorporated into our social studies unit. More than half of the children in my class brought back finished fire safety plans and I am pleased to think that those families are prepared for an emergency. We learned about how to recognize fire hazards and also what to do if our clothes catch on fire: STOP! DROP! ROLL! As promised, a couple of weeks later the firefighters were back and they brought a fire engine. Does your child know his/her full name, address and telephone number? It's important!
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Congratulations to Camden, our student of the month for March! The character trait being recognized is RESPECT. Well done to this respectful little guy - he's polite to adults, takes good care of his own and others' belongings, and treats his peers as he would like to be treated. Camden is especially helpful with our friends who have special needs. He's dressed up as a ninja here I believe! He also has good school spirit!
I've posted about the importance of spatial reasoning (or spatial awareness) before in regards to math, but it also plays a role in other areas of the curriculum - and life (just try to parallel park without it!) In social studies, we've been studying the community and as part and parcel of that we've been looking at a lot of maps and learning to read them. I think the kids all have a good understanding that a map is a representation of an area of land showing physical features such as roads, bodies of water, etc. The spatial awareness comes into play when you consider that you are looking at a vertical representation of a horizontal plane, and then you have to orient yourself and the map to the direction (north, south, east or west) too. That's where our little geographers are running into difficulty.
We all worked together to make a large map of the classroom. I had the kids place objects around the room by pointing to a spot on the map and saying, "Go put this over there." They loved that! Asking them to make their own map produced some interesting results! As can only be expected, there was a scale issue and many of them got disoriented transferring what they saw in the 3D world to a 2D representation. Still, I think we had a really good introduction to maps. We spent a lot of time on Google Earth and used the SMARTboard to overlay the satellite pictures we found there, then 'cut' the pictures to reveal. . . a map! Cason was very keen and asked for his own large piece of paper to make a map during his free time when he finished his work. I was happy to oblige, and snapped this picture of him. I then 'tweeted' it out and, to my amazement, because I mentioned the word 'mapping' in my post, it was 'retweeted', 'liked' and commented on by some very interesting people and places including GeoCo. GeoGO is a global non-profit initiative, promoting precise-first mapping in Austin, Texas. There's nothing that shows understanding better than when a child takes a concept and uses it in a new context to explain their thinking - and that's exactly what happened here! We have been working on fractions and discovering that a fraction is a part of a whole. We've also been doing a lot of adding and subtracting. The other day I gave pairs of students different word problems to solve. I was looking to see if they would know which operation to use and I'm happy to say everyone 'got' that, but then. . . this happened! These two pairs expressed their answers as fractions! I 'tweeted' it out - let's see how far it goes! I think this is amazing!
Everyone loves to play tic-tac-toe, the venerable game with the 'X's" and "O's" and 'three in a row' to win. The kids were keen to play, but there was a twist! Instead of "X" or "O", they had to use the patterns on the hundred chart! We did it all together a few times, then they happily went off in pairs to play. Excited and impressed with my students, I immediately "tweeted" some pictures. I was soon amazed by the number of 'retweets', 'likes' and comments that popped up from near and far, including a university in the States! We had our fifteen minutes of fame!! Obviously I was not the only one who was impressed! We've been working hard on place value, exploring it in many ways, but I still feel a few of the kids are not clear on the concept so I went looking for yet another way to reinforce that understanding. I thought this was a good way to do so, since they are all very familiar with a hundred chart. We represented the groups of ten by laying a rod along each decade on the chart, then represented the ones by placing a cube on each number. It's a different and new way of looking at it and hopefully it makes it clearer.
Having spent a long time exploring patterns on the 100 chart, we continue to explore place value. Understanding what place value is at a grade one level entails understanding of certain concepts, the first being cardinality. This principle reflects the child's understanding that the last number word of a group of counted items has a special meaning: it represents the set as a whole and the numerosity of this set of items. The child must also understand that our numeric system is based on groups of ten. It would be more accurate, and easier to understand, if spoken numbers corresponded exactly to their written equivalent so that 15 was "ten five" and 57 was "five tens, seven", but that's not how it's done! We've been using the abacus since day one of school, and most of the kids can recognize numbers on it quickly by counting by 10's. Taking that base, we've transferred groups of tens over to other manipulatives including snap cubes and base ten blocks (we call them rods and cubes). All of this is to reinforce concretely what the written numeric symbols represent. In the pictures below, the kids have been given a handful of circles and been asked to make groups of ten. We then laid a base ten rod on top of each pile of ten, then placed a 'ones' cube on top of each circle which was left over. We then moved the rods and cubes up to the top of the array to form a representation of the number, and finally wrote the number on a sticky note. When finished, we moved around the circle (like a carousel) to investigate all of the numbers we had made. The weather on Friday was just too lovely to stay inside, so we ventured over to the Walker Homesites playground, we have been looking at it from our school's yard for quite some time. With out reading/math buddies, we had a good hike and a lot of fun playing on the equipment.
Just before the break we finished up our science unit on objects, materials and structures. We discussed and explored how an object's structure helps it stand, move and stabilize - from a tent's poles to our body's skeleton - and along the way we discovered that the way the object is constructed is just as important as the materials it is made of. We found that the greater the area of the structure touching the ground, the more stable it will be. We also found that arches and triangles make structures stronger. Here are the kids trying to build card houses. . . not as easy as they thought! They worked at it a long time and quite a few of them went back to try again when they had some spare time over the next few days. |
About Mrs. C.Mrs. Cuckovic, or "Mrs. C." as she's called, is a retired educator who spent a long and varied career with the Greater Essex County District School Board in Windsor, Ontario. Archives
November 2020
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