Dear Blue Families,
The one and only thing we miss from our zoom days is seeing all your sweet pets! All the cute creatures were such a welcome presence on zoom meetings and we would love to sneak them into our classroom. We would like to invite you to send in pictures of your family pet/s. Feel free to send in a physical copy (labeled with your child’s name on the back so we can return it) or email us one to print out. Pets can span a wide variety from dogs to frogs but if you don’t have a “typical” pet we welcome pictures of surrogate pets, pet rocks, and stuffed animals too. We cant wait to get our Pet Hall of Fame Up in the room – thanks for your help in making this happen!
Meet our pets
Nessy
&
Poppa
Math Mania!
To kick off our unit ‘Numbers and Operations in Base 10’ – understanding value vs. digits, counting and skip counting, and reading and writing multi-digit numbers based on place value, and in expanded form – we started with Legos. Students were introduced to Counting Collections by collaborating on an all-class Lego count. We dumped all of our Legos on the floor and discussed strategies to count them together as a class. The group settled on snapping together 10 Legos at first and then grouping 10 sets together to make a group of 100. Once this was underway and we had several hundred counted the class noticed they could group 10 sets of 100 together to make 1000. This cooperative counting, grouping, and regrouping continued for a couple of math sessions until all the legos we accounted for.
Students loved a game called “Make Ten!” It can be played as make any number but we started with ten. Partners lay cards with the numbers 0-10 (and a Wild Card) in a 3-by-3 array. The partners then take turns picking up combinations that make ten, for example, 4 + 6 or 2 x 5. After each turn whatever cards in the array were picked up are replaced and the next partner takes their turn. Partners are encouraged to check the math of those they play with. Partnerships can also determine how cards can be used i.e. only as single digits or in combinations to form larger numbers, for instance, a 4 card and a 6 card become 46. The object is to pick up as many cards as possible, and thus crazy combinations are created 4 2 + 2 9 + 1 8 + 8 + 3 = 100 ÷ 10.
To familiarize themselves with how many ones, tens, and hundreds make up any given number we did a little measuring. I know you may be thinking, “Measuring…. um, what?!?” but bear with us. Through measuring with a math tool known as a ten stick or hundreds board students explored the idea of combining groups of tens/hundreds, counting by tens/hundreds, understanding how many groups of ten/hundred comprise a number …and so much more all while practicing measuring distance, perimeter, and area.
Students measured the length and height of various pieces of tape, and the perimeter and area of various rectangular shapes (you may have heard the kids excited about silly names such as ‘Bob’ and ‘Bab’ we named the lengths of tape and shapes to keep track of them). Students uncovered the importance of being accurate and precise when measuring; leaving no space between units of measurement, measuring in straight lines, not measuring around corners when working with perimeter, and measuring the full length or area allotted.
All the while students were repeatedly combining groups of ones/tens/hundreds to find the measurements. They utilized different measuring techniques like combining the doubled length and height to find the perimeter or multiplying. They also utilized strategies that fit them as mathematicians: they could opt to count by tens, or convert the idea of 18 ten sticks means 180 ones, or multiply the amount of ten sticks measured by 10. We noticed the trend that when you convert from measuring by tens sticks to single units we add a ‘0’ to the end of the number. For example 20 ten sticks = 200 ones, 9 hundreds boards = 90 tens sticks = 900 ones. Students recorded their measuring of the various forms.
