math

Hi. Our recent math has been dictated by the season and emergent from weekly student jobs. Since I last posted, students concluded the geometry unit by listening to A Cloak for the Dreamer, a story of a tailor with three sons and the geometric designs they created for cloaks. The 2nd graders then created designs for a cloak using geometric shapes.

Students have been regularly working on task cards and number scrolls. During class jobs, students practice addition, subtraction, graphing, place value and money. The math quizzer presents fellow classmates with challenging problems to solve, such as ‘what is 10,000 + 22,000’? Or 9,000 X 9,000?

During the month of October graphing reigned supreme as students completed Apple Investigations, cooked for the Harvest Festival, graphed the money collected in the Drive for Schools, and participated in The Pumpkin Caper. As part of the Apple Investigation, students selected an apple, made predictions as to its weight, circumference, and ounces once juiced. They then, measured, weighed and juiced and compared their findings to their hypotheses. As a group, we graphed the favourite apples in our community and spoke of minimum and maximum as applied to this data.

Second grade students prepared zucchini chocolate chip bread and lemon verbena lemonade for the Harvest Festival with the help of two older students, myself, and Marine, Elio’s mother. For Drive for Schools, we practiced counting by 5s and 10s and counting up by 1000s, as well as graphing. The Pumpkin Caper was similar to the Apple Investigation in that students chose a pumpkin and made hypotheses as to weight, circumference, number of seeds, and whether the pumpkin would sink or float. Alyssia, Rowan’s mother, came to assist and speak to us about growing the pumpkins and I read a story about the pumpkin life cycle called The Pumpkin Circle. Students collected the data on their pumpkins and graphed the findings. Most of the pumpkins were carved into jack o’ lanterns for the Halloween party, however we used one to prepare a yummy keto pumpkin pie, recipe courtesy of Sibyl, Teddy’s mother.

We have begun a unity on money by observing the similarities and differences between a penny, nickel, and dime. Students also played the game Race to a Quarter as part of this unity. At home, you could have your child sort your coins and determine the value or get out change when you are shopping .

We also completed an activity on ratio using cuisenaire rods. Together we measured the width of one table using the largest orange rod. Given the knowledge that the yellow rod measured half of the orange rod, students were asked to determine how many yellow rods would fit across the table without actually measuring.

Animal care continues to be a fun, responsible task that we complete each week.