First 2 Weeks: Frog Jumping

I have made a commitment to myself to work through the Edugains document that spirals the math curriculum this year. I’ve put a fair bit of time into creating a long range plan that follows the document. But one thing I’m worried about is that it will effect my flexibility. Will I be able to follow our interests on a tangent? Will I be able to speed up or slow down as we want to? I suspect I’ll be able to, but I’m still wondering about it.

The activity we’ve been working on this week is an example. I’d intended to spend one day on it, but tomorrow will be day 3 and I am sure I’ll have to/want to come back to it. We’ve had such a good time and have used so many math skills at once, not to mention some science and literacy skills. I want to keep doing that! I also want to reap the benefits of spiralling our learning.

I bought a bunch of plastic frogs from Amazon. I wanted us to measure whose could jump furthest.

Day 1:

They came up with fun ways to get the frogs to go farther. They had them jumping from chair to chair, and across a gap between tables.

They even got interested in how high the frogs could jump!

Getting the frogs to jump took some fine motor skills I hadn’t anticipated, which is the main reason this 1 day activity needed a second day…or so I thought!

Day 2:

Uncurling the paper was a big challenge!

Day 3:

Finally the contest! I thought, based on previous results, that a ruler would be long enough for everyone to measure the distance their frog jumped. Then I sat beside a friend who had a metre stick and made my frog jump 74 cm. We spent Friday discovering lots of could make the frogs jump farther than we thought. Having the contest going helped them focus on that one thing instead of continually experimenting. One group even showed us a great way to record the measurements:

We were interrupted as I was beginning to get to the group who was using this strategy, so I can’t explain what the S’s are for. We’ll take this up on Monday! my nicely organized measuring tool bucket looked like this as we rushed out the door for dismissal:

I learned a lot from this activity! I know that everyone knows about rulers and tape measures. I know that not everyone sees them as the best way to measure distance. I know some kids recognize the need to record their thinking so they can share later. I know who has some great strategies for working with partners and who sees math as a solitary venture. At least this math anyway.

I feel like I want to do more measuring. I also want to move forward with patterning because we clearly need that. According to The Plan, we are going to start with sorting and classifying objects.

But the whole point of spiralling is that I figure out how to measure AND pattern next week. I’m also documenting this work electronically so I don’t have to start fresh again next year! I’m also noticing, but probably won’t bother collecting data (maybe I should?), how often I mention “other” math. We weren’t talking about fractions but I found that discussion about 1/2 came up frequently. We weren’t talking about probability but we did talk about “average”. And we weren’t talking about data management, but we certainly did manage our data.

So there you have it! First 2 weeks: done!