Our Community Market

For the last two weeks, students in 214 have been hard at work planning, designing, engineering (and sometimes redesigning) storefronts for our upcoming Community Market. In pairs, students will open a shop, sell products, give the right change, and go shopping!

Students were faced with the challenge to create an inviting storefront that encouraged them to think about branding and advertising, all while learning about how to use coin amounts up to $2.

Over the course of this integrated unit, students have become familiar with basic media literacy concepts, as well as regularly exploring the names and values of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies, and toonies. We have spent time adding, subtracting, and comparing these values as well as combining coins to make larger amounts.

Please encourage your child to continue practicing with coin values at home. Here are some ways you can encourage your child to use coins and have fun with it:

• Ask your child to help you make the right change when shopping
• Perform pretend 'transactions' at home for things in the cupboard
• Add up the cost of certain groceries on the receipt (like all the fruit or all the veggies)
• Think of all the combinations of coins that could be used to make your age (eg. if you are 42 years old, how many different combinations of coins could be used to make 42 cents?)

Our Community Market will be taking place this Wednesday afternoon and students from other classrooms will be visiting to go shopping!

Sorting Woozles!!!

Since returning from the winter holidays, students in Room 214 have already been hard at work continuing with their learning of how to sort and categorize objects using various attributes. Our classroom was also very lucky this week to have Mrs. Christine Rowe-Quinn, our Family of Schools Math Coach, come for a visit to see us in action.

Students began this work before the holiday, but we revisited and reinforced these concepts this week using 'Woozles' (pictured below). These funny germ-like creatures have various attributes such as dots, colours (they were coloured red and blue), fuzziness and shape that can help us to sort them into various categories.

Please click here. to print a set at home to try with your child. Print two copies and use a different colour to colour each set (one set of eight will be one colour, the other set of eight a different colour). Then cut them out and sort away!

Woozle Cards (uncoloured)

We asked students to work in teams to create categories using the attributes listed above, then place their woozles into string loops depending on their sorting rules. Some students even decided to create their own Venn Diagrams, creating a middle category for commonalities between already sorted woozles. Wow!

Students sorting using 2 attributes!

Mrs. Christine Rowe-Quinn discussing patterning with students

We owe a big thank you to Christine for coming into our classroom and helping us all to become better mathematicians! THANK YOU!!!

A Virtual Tour of What's New in Room 214...

In the last few weeks, I have made some changes to the classroom and I thought it would be good to share some of these changes through a mini virtual tour.

The Interactive Word Wall

Students can get up close and personal with the new interactive word wall in our classroom. The reason I call it an interactive word wall is because students can actually walk right up to it and take a word to help them right from the wall. Then, when they are done with it, they can stick it right back onto the wall! This is a great practice in independence, responsibility, and makes for properly spelled words on their work. Students will also be encouraged to add their own words to the word wall to make it more enriching. Here is a picture of a small part of the word wall:

Math Wall

As we learn concepts in math, we learn new terms and symbols that will help us to show our knowledge. I now have all of these terms and symbols on our new Math Wall. Students can always look to the math wall if they need help with words and symbols. The math wall is also a place where work is posted after three part math lessons have been completed. Students can look at the math wall to get a better understanding of some of the different strategies their classmates have used to solve the same problems. Here is a picture of the math words and symbols component of our math wall:

Stayed tuned for another update on the Wonder Wall that is currently in the works!

Three Part Math Lessons

Students in room 214 have been working very hard their foundational math skills these last few weeks. They have been introduced to word problems, many of which have come in home for grade 2's in their math take home books. These word problems challenge students to think about how to apply strategies they are comfortable with to real life problems. Many of these explorations have also taken place through guided three part math lessons.

For more in depth information on three part math lesson, please CLICK HERE

Three part lessons involve three different steps. Firstly, the 'getting started' portion involves a minds on approach, helping students to get focussed and start thinking in the frame of mind required to help them solve problems. The 'working on it' phase is where the real cognitive work comes into play. Students are challenged with the problem, and spend time working on it independently or collaboratively with a partner. Grade 1's are often teamed up with Grade 2's during this phase. Pictures, words, and number are always encouraged with a focus on putting their thinking onto paper. The last part is the 'consolidation' phase that involves discussions, new learning, and introductions to questions that need still need answering. This is also the point when students are asked to talk about their strategies and learn from each other which ones might be the most efficient.

Mr. Hochberg helping students with addition concepts

Mr. Hochberg, our Principal at 20th, has taken time out of his day a few times to co-teach some of these three part lessons with me. Students are always excited to have Mr. Hochberg in the room and his encouragement has really helped many students.

Thanks Mr. Hochberg

Learning Place Value through Base Ten Blocks

Students have been learning a lot about place value through their practice using math manipulatives. 'Manipulative' is just a fancy word for a tool to help a student learn experientially about concepts that are often abstract. In our classroom, we've been learning a lot about addition and the values of tens and ones. Base ten blocks have helped us explore these concepts in tactile ways. This is something that is both challenging and fun. Students have been making numbers in different ways and noticing patterns and groupings that will help to solidify or cement their knowledge of math concepts.

Here are some really creative examples of different ways students have explored making 25:

25 using 1's blocks

25 using a 10's rod and three groups of five 1's

25 using five groups of 1's

25 using groups of two 1's with one block left over

These are important building blocks for looking at grouping numbers and learning to do mental math using friendly numbers such as 1, 2, 5, 10, and 25. Please challenge your child to do simple addition at the grocery store, dinner table, and with the fingers on their own hands! I have also included a link on the 'Important Resources' page to an online tool for exploring base ten blocks.

Fun with Patterns in Room 214!

Our first mathematics unit has been so much fun so far. We have been talking about, learning about, and making our own patterns. It started with our names, where we created patterns using the letters of our names repeated in a 4 X 8 grid. We coloured in the same letters with the same colours and created works of art!

The grade 1s have been looking at patterns in nature and the grade 2s have been making patterns using connecting blocks and polygons based on shape, colour and more! Soon, grade 2s will be looking at growing and shrinking patterns using numbers, and grade 1s will be challenged to think about 2 and 3 attribute patterns.

What you can do...

Please talk about patterns with your child, and help your child to notice and point out patterns when you or he/she sees them. How are they incorporated into everyday life, art, math, nature and so on? These are enriching discussions to have with your child and it will help him/her to understand the value in learning patterns (even our ABC's and 123's are patterns!).

Have your child play the following math game to have fun learning about patterns:

Flower Frenzy (available through the Virtual Library as well)

Also, here are some other ideas for you to try with your child:

• Here's a great musical patterning idea for you! You can play this little game with as many kids as you'd like. Stand in a circle, and choose someone to go first. Ask each child to put together a three-step musical pattern (such as clap, snap, clap). Once the child has shown the rest of the group his/her pattern, everyone does the same. Continue with all the kids until everyone has had an opportunity to make his/her own musical pattern, and then try to put them all together!
• Art and patterning go hand in hand. Find yourself enough large-squared graph paper for you and your kids. Make sure you have lots of crayons or markers near by. Silently, each person decides on a specific pattern (not too long) and colours it on the graph paper (such as blue, red, yellow, yellow, red, blue). Once everyone has made their initial pattern, trade papers to the right, and the next person has to follow the same pattern. Continue along until the entire page has been filled.
• Patterning in everyday life! You can do this activity while you're driving in the car or walking through the neighbourhood! You will need a pencil, pencil crayons, and something to write on like a notebook (blank or lined, it doesn't really matter). On your trip or walk, have your kids record everything they see with a pattern! For example, if you see a building with lots of windows, your child would write the word "building with windows" and then would draw the pattern next to it (e.g., four windows followed by a beam, then four windows then another beam). Share your findings.