More Math Resources

Friday, September 26, 2014

We are working with the math committee again today, trying to get ready for the PARCC assessment that is coming in March.  We think we finally have a good sequence of lessons and activities that will hopefully prepare our students for this assessment.

Before we talk about some of our activities we did this week, we want to tell you about two math resources you may be interested in checking out.  Many of you may be familiar with the math site TenMarks, but our first time using it was this summer with our tutoring students. Students can go to the site and practice various math concepts.  The problems/lessons are challenging, but the students love them.  This site is a fabulous supplement to what you are already teaching.  We are planning on incorporating it into our daily math block.

Another resource that we just looked at today is called Georgia Common Core Standards.  It seems very user friendly, hands-on and engaging.  We are supplementing some of our math curriculum with these lessons.  We are really excited to implement them.

Two weeks ago we talked about the strategy of synthesizing.  This week we took that concept a bit further through science and writing.  As an extension to our study of polymers, the students created and tested a new question about the statement Polymers absorb liquid.  Some of the questions included: What would happen if the polymer was put in Coke?  What would happen if the polymer was put in chlorinated water?  What would happen if the polymer was put in colored water?  From this we drew the conclusion that polymers absorb liquids that contain water.  The more water the liquid contains the bigger the polymer grew.  

Polymer nose in chlorine.

Polymer hand in colored water.

We then wanted them to take this knowledge and apply it to answer the question: How can polymers make our lives better?  Again they did a great job of coming up with more ways polymers could be used in the real world than we could ever have imagined.

Synthesis

Our reading has focused on poetry and devices poets use when writing poems.  The students are having a great time finding these devices in the poems they read.  To help solidify some of these devices we made flip books.  Each page included a device word and an example of that device.  During Daily 5 the students read a variety of poems and then wrote a poem review.  They used their flip books to complete the review sheet.  These lessons are leading us into reading and analyzing narrative poems.

Our writing went along with our mini poem study.  The students wrote autobiography poems.  After editing them, they published them in Pages and used Photo Booth to import a funny picture of themselves.  As they hang in the hallway, many people have stopped by to enjoy.

Have a wonder weekend.  We are off to the reading conference next week.  Hopefully we will have some fun ideas to share.

Kim and Anne

A Crazy Week

Friday, September 19, 2014

Well it was crazy week!  We had two days of MAP testing, picture day, a CAP program, and a day of working on the math committee.  Needless to say we are in the middle of everything, and have nothing to show yet.

But, we do have a great math and language arts resource to share with you.  We learned about this resource through our math committee work.   It is a website called Engage New York.  This is a curriculum written by teachers that correlates to the PARCC assessment.  It looks challenging, but fantastic.  We are going to try Module One in math in two weeks.  We will let you know how it goes.

Next week we hope to share our writing and science experiment with you, and maybe a few more things if we get them done.  

We hope you have a great weekend.

Kim and Anne

Synthesizing!

September 12, 2014

Well, the week started off a little shaky, but it ended with a bang, thanks to all of the wonderful things we learned from the Smekens Retreat last June.

Each day, we have introduced a reading strategy that good readers use, as suggested by Kristina Smekens. It has worked out beautifully! We have one more strategy to go, but today was our favorite so far!

We started with the question, What do you do when you want to bake a cake? We used props to show the connection between baking a cake and synthesizing information while you read. Then, we introduced synthesizing through a poster, and a song.

Then, came the fun part! We had asked students to bring in a bottle of Snapple. We were going to have a Snapple party! The lids of the bottles have unique facts. We wanted the students to synthesize some of these unique facts with their background knowledge. We were so pleased with the conversations the students had!

After that, we handed each student a page from the book, 101 Hidden Animals by Melvin and Gilda Berger. We had the students read the page, and try to notice new thoughts they had about the animal on their page.

The last part of today was synthesizing with the science activity we did last week. It was perfect! To give you a little background, our school theme this year is Growing a Madison Mindset. We have been learning about our brain, and how important it is to have a growth mindset. To illustrate this abstract topic with our students, we used another great Steve Spangler activity called Growing Body Parts. We placed a small polymer brain in water and continued to measure its growth for seven days. We were amazed at how it grew so large! Then, we took it out of the water, and continued measuring. It shrank.
So the challenge for the students was to synthesize these two ideas. We knew it was going to be hard, and they would have to persevere, and they did! What a great way to end the week!

We are looking forward to a restful weekend and a great next week!

Kim and Anne