An Excellent November
I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for coming to our Thanksgiving Feast, and for taking the time to come back down to the classroom to see some of the things the children have been working on over the past month.
I am currently spending the bulk of my free time trying to conceptualize how to communicate with you at home the process that goes into our projects. The end result, which you see, is an important piece of the puzzle, but it is in no way the most interesting element. Witnessing the children collaborate while brainstorming their ideas about a subject is something that I am continually interested in sharing with you at home. I also would like for you to see more of the thought process that I observe that goes into how they plan out their writing and problem solving.
I believe that I can use this website to help convey the children's thoughts to the outside community, but time constraints have kept me from putting this at the top of my list. So, I am making an early New Years Resolution to communicate the learning inside of the classroom onto this page of the website. Instead of treating this page as a "what we are working on in ______" type of format, I will soon begin to treat this page as an evidence of thinking and learning section. Thus is the reason for the change in the tab above from "Newsletter" to "Documentation".
Collecting Cans Inspires a Tens and Ones Obsession
For the past month the children have been bringing in canned goods to help feed the less fortunate in the Atlanta area. I want to thank all of our parents at home for their donations, and for providing a wonderful learning experience for their children at the same time.
The children took the time over the past two weeks to count out the cans that our class collected. They experimented with many different counting techniques such as counting by 2's, 5's, and 10's. Then I introduced the green place value blocks into the environment to see if the students would be able to represent the number of cans we have collected using the blocks. They were able to master the concept of tens and ones so I decided to challenge them by sharing the number of cans that each teacher in first grade had collected. The children struggled with adding the total number of cans that each of the classes had contributed until they began to join and exchange the place value blocks instead of using the typical algorithm to solve the problem.
This 4 day exploration of place value solidified the very valuable concept in the children's understanding of mathematics. If we had blindly entered into this area of the curriculum without a meaningful reason to incorporate the models that the children used they never would have shown the internal motivation to learn about this concept. I was very impressed with their ideas, and learned a lot from their approach.