Month 1: Done

It feels like school just started. And yet, September is nearly over. In fact, it ends this week. We are headed into our fourth week of school. At this point I would usually know if my class was going to be reorganized due to school enrolment, but it’s all still being organized. I’ve decided not to worry about it and carry on.

This year I am using a curriculum planning guide I created last year and updated over the summer to reflect the new curriculum. Of course, the Ministry has also released some suggested long-range plans of their own. (Found here.) I was really intentional about where I put things on my own calendar, and I liked the sequencing I was using last year. In addition, I like how it was spiralled and we came back to every concept at least once over the course of the year. When school closed in March, I had already covered everything at least once – even probability! I am inclined to stick with my own plan. However, I am also going to consult with the Ministry suggested timeline just to see how that team has set it all up.

Last week my class spent some time on patterns. We made patterns with manipulatives, and we made patterns with numbers on the 120 chart. It was fun! I was initially worried about using manipulatives, but have decided the hassle is worth it. I spent time every afternoon washing manipulatives in hot water and soap so we could use them again the next day. I bought some colanders at the dollar store to help with the draining and drying. It’s working out okay.

I feel like there were one hundred different things going on, but the fast pace and changes from one thing to another seemed to be what we needed so I went with it. We have been doing some dancing for our Daily Physical Activity (DPA) and several of the dances we used were patterned repeating dances. In coding this is called a loop, so that is what I have been calling them. This is our favourite:

By the end of the week we had met all the goals on our success criteria:

*making repeating, growing and shrinking patterns with math tools, numbers and our bodies.

*explaining our patterns to others. (a math process skill)

*being creative in math. (another math process skill)

*persevering through the hard parts. (This is one of the social emotional learning goals in the new math curriculum.)

So what’s next? According to the Ministry long range plan, the one organized by guiding questions) I should be doing some data management about the class. We should be gathering info about our height, our siblings, etc. and graphing it. They also have movement words this month. I’m still not feeling 100% certain about reorganization, so I think I’ll put that off for a week.

On my plan, I have some work with 2D and 3D shapes. We need to be describing them by their attributes at this point (we’ll work on them more in depth later.) I am going to stick with this, and add the movement expectations (E 1.4 relative location, and E1.5 directions for movement). These fit with the work we have been doing already. I also have the robots on loan from the resource centre, so I am going to want to use those. I have a fun lesson plan from the math project I’m involved in and I need to try it out. This is why I borrowed the robots actually. So this week we’re going to work on movement and we are going to work on following patterns on the 120 chart with the help of our robots. And I am now going to spend some time today figuring out how to make a giant 120 chart since my hundred carpet is now banished to the attic until the pandemic is over. I’m tempted to start number line work simply because a long number line is going be easier to create on the floor than a hundred chart.

Stay apart

I started my school year with three students. We had a staggered entry and my two grades straddled the split between who started Wednesday and who started Thursday.

I was thinking a lot about physical distancing. Kids don’t really know how long a metre is – they really truly don’t! A metre, a mile, a moose – these units of measure are things they are still trying to figure out. In addition, they are busy figuring out where they exist in space. They aren’t all really sure where they end and someone else begins.

I decided to start off by asking them how big a meter is. I wanted them to have a frame of reference and a benchmark for how far apart they should be from one another.

We watched a video about the importance of staying 1 metre apart from each other. I said to the three, “Do you know what a meter is?” They did not. Makes sense since they are in grade 2. I asked, “Can you find some things that are as long as this meter stick? Some things that are 1 meter long?”

We then spent an hour measuring stuff in the room and in the hall and then we had to go outside for another thirty minutes of measuring because my three friends were obsessed with holding the metre stick up to things and asking, “Does this count?” Sort of like when we were driving across Ontario in August and my own children were obsessed with asking, “How much longer?”

Some really cool things happened during this time. We found out that you can stand at certain spots beside our tables and be a metre apart, but if you stand at other parts you are not a metre apart. We discovered that three floor tiles are equal to 1 metre. This was true for the white tiles in our classroom, the white tiles in the hallway, and the blue and yellow tiles in the hallway. We discovered that 2 1/2 bricks on the hall wall are 1 meter long. And the ladder on the play structure is less than a meter. So is the storm drain.

I spent a lot of time asking them if they were a meter apart and they had to use these benchmarks to figure it out.

The rest of the class joined us the next day and I couldn’t take 20 kids out to measure stuff in the hall so we used the photos from the day before. They had to basically memorize the two benchmarks we focused on and they were sort of good at it. They were very good during the lesson! They were less good at doing this in the wild. They even had trouble with the “Superhero arms” measure of distance. They are kids after all.

So I’m plotting my next step now. In the new curriculum both grades need to do some work with centimetres and meters. (E2.2) For now I am going to be content with helping them develop a feel for how long a metre is. We have moved into doing some work with figuring out how to use manipulatives, especially now when sharing has become complicated.