Our Math eBook Collaboration!

We had an excellent Skype call with Mrs. Lesher's first grade class at the Episcopal Academy in Newtown Square, PA this morning. Students were ready first thing, just as soon as they arrived at school and took off their winter gear. Ms. Powers, the technology coordinator at the other school, created a blog post about our experience! The video below is in her blog post, but I thought I should post it directly on this page to make it easier to see. We sent each other eBooks we created with the Book Creator app back at the end of November, so it was nice to be able to finally connect in a different way (Skype) to talk about our learning! This was a new type of collaboration for me, and I think it went very well!

Math Moments

We are practicing telling time to the hour, and soon we will add telling time to the half hour. Students made paper clocks this week, which should have made their way home. I told students these clocks would be great for telling time practice at home. We have plenty of wooden mini clocks at school for this purpose. Making the clocks was fun, too! We've been talking about how many hours are in a day, what the terms a.m. and p.m. mean, and what types of things we do at various times during the day to raise everyone's awareness of time and how it influences our day. It's a big concept!

Students have had a chance to explore some important math tools in a non-mathematical way recently. I allowed students to use rulers for drawing straight lines, connecting the dots, and creating designs and dominoes for building and creating designs, mazes, etc. Soon, these items will be important tools in our math workshop for measurement (rulers) and exploring addition and subtraction (dominoes). I've found that once students have had a chance to explore and play, they are ready to use these tools like mathematicians when the time comes.

Math Stations today

We are really into the groove of Math Stations during Math Workshop! Ask your child about Penny Bowl and the "magic" behind it (unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of it yet!). They are getting good with those compliments of 10! Math apps on the iPad are a favorite too--Math Doodles/Sums Stacker is a challenge-by-choice favorite! I am continually amazed by these first grade mathematicians!

Making Ten

We started to explore ways to make 10 today, an important foundation skill in math. We will explore this concept in many ways this week and throughout the year. Today, students used unifix cubes to make sticks of 10 with two colors. They then showed the corresponding number models on a recording page. In another math station, students play the math game "Penny Cup" on the computer, which is a game that helps children practice combinations of 10 in a different format.

Day 2!

Boys and girls eased right into Day 2 of first grade. Impressive! They were especially engaged and attentive during our Math Workshop. We have yet to implement many of the routines of Math Workshop, but taking it slowly is what will help make it successful in the long run. Students are getting familiar with the Math Meeting part of our math time, which includes reviewing the calendar (date, days of the week, months of the year, etc.) and the number of the day routine (watch for a post on this coming soon!). These activities lead into our math mini-lesson, which is a whole-group teaching time about a skill or concept that will help the entire group of mathematicians further their math skills. Since everyone is coming to first grade with different readiness levels, it's important to differentiate our math work, and this will happen during math station time, which will begin sometime next week. This is the time that I can meet with small groups of students to meet their individual needs. 

Today's math mini-lesson was about a tool that we will be using quite a bit in our Math Workshop--Pattern Blocks. We will use Pattern Blocks to explore several skills--parts of a whole (fractions), comparing attributes, patterning, and symmetry--just to name a few. 

You will learn that I like to use pictures to help tell the story of what we do in first grade. I can't photograph everything, but I hope that throughout this school year this blog helps you get a glimpse into life in first grade...enjoy (and leave comments)!

Students already love our document camera as much as I do. It allows us to project anything that we put under it onto our interactive white board. Today we used it to review the Pattern Block shape names and then to allow a few students to show their ideas for how to use Pattern Blocks (we have a very creative group!). They are brave too--it takes a lot of courage to share ideas in front of the whole group so early in the year!

I love it when students look so happy to be sharing their ideas/thinking!

After we explored Pattern Blocks as a whole group, students were given the choice of working alone or with classmates, at tables or on the floor, to create something. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

We ended our exploration of Pattern Blocks with a "Museum Walk." This is a time when students can look at each other's creations to get ideas from one another and have the opportunity to "show off" their great work!

We have now completed two "Mystery Names of the Day." This is an activity that is part of our SWR time (Spelling, Writing, and Reading), which is a time of the day that we explore spelling, phonics, and word study in general. It's a fun (and meaningful) way to review letters/sounds, putting letters together to form words, vowels vs. consonants, etc. Most importantly, the class seems to enjoy it! :-)

Mrs. McCleary, our School Counselor, is awesome! She stopped by today to say hello and read us a book. She will be in each Thursday morning starting next week for regular Guidance classes. I will post updates about her lessons as the year goes on, but be sure to also check out her blog. It's listed in the UMS/CSD Links tab above. 

 

Educreations in Math

Technology is a part of our math workshop every day. Everyone seems to look forward to going to the Technology station (there are four stations: Meet with the Teacher, All by Myself, Technology, and Hands On). The technology station activities are on both the iPads and the computers in our classroom. It's been a while since students used the Educreations app, but they were invited today (and for some, tomorrow) to use this powerful demonstration app to teach about something they know in math--fact strategies, how to use function machines, and several other topics were suggested.

It's fun to listen to students' creations later on and to notice how much they take in during our math mini-lessons. It can be hard to tell sometimes whether or not students are truly "getting it" as I teach, but when I see/hear them teaching about how to use a function machine, use doubles facts to figure out other math facts, etc. it makes it clear that those light bulbs are indeed turning on! More importantly, students enjoy creating these tutorials and showing what they know.

In the past, I've had students use this app at home to create short teaching tutorials and then email them to me. If your family has an iPad, I'd encourage you to allow your child to use this free app to create something.

If you'd like to see some of the latest Educreations lessons, please visit the iPad tab at the top of this blog: http://mrssorensonfirstgrade.blogspot.com/p/ipad.html. I will keep updating it as we go!

Patterns and the iPad

Some groups used the iPad today to record their thinking about patterns during our math workshop station time. ShowMe is a very basic, easy-to-use, FREE app. It has many possibilities, which I'm sure we'll explore as the year goes on. Today, I taught children how to take a photo of the pattern they created, label it with letters, and then record their descriptions of the pattern. Here are some samples from today. I hope to share everyone's soon. Also, only half of the class did this station today--the rest will enjoy this activity tomorrow.

This was the lesson I created with students as an example:


Here is Zachary's lesson:


Here is Makayla's lesson:


Here is Kasil's lesson:


Here is Kamron's lesson:

Mirroring with the iPad using Apple TV

It has been wonderful having access to multiple iPads for the past several weeks. The iPad cart is such an amazing resource! We use the iPads in many ways--the photos below show students working with a partner to show given amounts of coins. Once everyone had enough "think time" to come up with coin combinations that equaled the given amount, students were invited to mirror their solutions on the interactive whiteboard. Mirroring means that whatever is shown on an individual iPad can be projected onto another screen. This allowed several student partnerships to show their work and describe their thinking in a relatively short period of time. 

 

 

 

 

Valentine Math

Themed-based math activities are always popular in 1st grade, and the two shown below were no exception! Students enjoyed a spin on the usual Name Collection boxes in our 1st grade Everyday Math program--"Be Mine Boxes." Students drew a number of foam hearts, wrote that number in the middle heart, and then wrote four ways to represent that number (we call them other "names" for the number). I am impressed with everyone's hard work and thinking!

Our second Valentine math activity was a lesson in probability. More on that in the captions below...

Conversation Heart Probability...

First, students made a prediction: Which color candy heart did they think they would pull out of the bag the most often? (They did not look in the bag first.)

Students then took candy hearts out of the bag one at a time and recorded the color with a tally mark on their recording sheets.

After a few minutes of drawing hearts out of the bag and tallying their colors, I stopped the class and had them record which color was pulled out of the bag most often. Each table had a color that was the most common. So, I posed the question, "Why do you think each table had a color that was pulled out of the bag more often than any other?" Students still hadn't looked in the bags. This was a stumper! Many figured it was just luck/coincidence.

I then prompted students to work with their table mates to take the hearts out of the bag and sort them. What did they notice then? THEN the lightbulbs of discovery started to glow--"Oh, now it's obvious why one color was more popular!" and "NOW I get it!" and "It all makes sense now!" 

Each table group discovered that there was a lot more hearts of one certain color in each bag. Therefore, if there were many more orange hearts in the bag, it was most likely that students would pull an orange heart out more often than any other color.

It was so neat to see/hear students make the mathematical discovery of probability. I was so proud of how they listened to one another and worked as a team. 

Some table groups did not have as clear a "winner" as far as which color was represented more than any other, but all groups did get to see how the probability of pulling certain colors out of the bag was much less than others (for example, in the photo above, there was a low probability of pulling an orange candy heart from the bag). It was great! (Can you tell I'm excited about this lesson?!)

This isn't math (see below), but children decorated bags at the end of the day Monday in preparation for our party yesterday. They also made cards today. I hope it all made it home safely!

Miss a math lesson? Check this out!

I keep finding incredible applications to use on the iPad, and there are some neat things to come in first grade using the iPads (STUDENTS using them, not just me!). Educreations is my latest find. I was playing around with it today and thought about two recent math lessons--Name Collection Boxes and Fact Families. We had a lot of illness in our classroom a couple weeks ago and several students missed these main lessons. I made a couple of short tutorial videos on the iPad, which I've embedded below. I am eager to have students be the voice on videos like this...showing something they know, explaining their thinking...the possibilities are endless!

(Press the Play arrow to see the "videos.")

100 Days Smarter!

Happy 100th Day! It was a busy and fun day in our classroom. Here are some things to ask your child to tell you more about...

• switching classes with other first graders
• school-wide meeting
• hidden Hershey kisses
• math stations
• special snack

(Photos of these activities are included in the slideshow at the end of this post...)

Lined up and ready for our School-Wide Meeting! Their 100th Day ties turned out so well!

Bright-eyed and ready to go first thing in the morning! 

The end of the line was a wee bit silly! :-)

At the end of the 100th Day--our silly shot!

End of the 100th Day--happy shot!

Another great group photo--a mix and happy and silly!

This slideshow made with Smilebox

This slideshow made with Smilebox