Comments+Week+of+May+9





One of the drafts of the Common Core Standards had the concepts on one side of the paper and the skills on the other. While we know the 2 are interwoven, some of us felt this was usefull for helping to clarify the information. Because our topic is complex, I tried this approach with the developmental story. I think I got everything we talked about. Please edit. It is easy to make changes before we put everything together. I think I addressed PJ's concern about the number of variations...just keep them guessing as to how many they are. ..not sure what to do about the recomposing which PJ brought up. Ideas? I think I fixed the typo. ..any more? Please bring blocks and worksheets and we'll try out the lesson this Weds. Thanks, Becky

Hello, Today in class we explored using the digi-blocks. What fun they had! I didn't give them any directions at all but told the class they could have five minutes to explore. After five minutes I asked the class to tell me some things that they noticed about them. I had to laugh though. We are studying "geometric solids" right now and most of the kids were saying, "It's a rectangular prism!". After exploration I asked the students to count the blocks and tell me how many they had. I asked them to talk for one minute to decide how they were going to count together. One group immediately decided to put in groups of ten, but they did not "pack" the suitcases. Two other groups followed suit after unsuccessfully trying to count by ones. One child starting putting the ones inside the "tens suitcase". After one group started the rest followed suit "packing".

There was also some discussion about making a "ten". When counting some of the students had a couple of partially filled tens. Some groups eventually figured out that they needed to combine in order to make a ten. I demonstrated that when you don't put 10 in, that they will fall out all over the place.

On another note, the ten/ones boards that I have will be too small to use for next week's lesson. I was thinking about making some larger ones and seeing if Lele would laminate them. Does anyone have any bigger tens/ones boards that we could use before I make them??

Stephanie

I have larger part part whole boards that I use for subtraction with negative numbers. We can use them. They are made of large orange construction paper. Diane