98…99…100!

We started keeping track of our own acts of kindness about 2 weeks ago. We needed to know of what it really means to be kind, and conscious of when we were actually doing it.

To help us out, I printed a sheet of 100 hearts. Our goal was achieved in only 6 school days!

Of course I found a way to add some math. There are ten hearts in each row. Initially I coloured in 5 hearts with one marker and the other 5 in another colour. We were counting by 5s and it was all going well until someone decided to put us on the fast track and do some covert colouring of hearts.

For the second attempt I switched to bingo daubers and counting by 10s. At first only one child was counting the hearts…both up and down. “We have 12, so 88 to go!” They’d say. Then more kids jumped in and every time I’d colour in a few (they always had many acts of kindness to report after recess) more and more kids would help with the running total, as well as the number remaining. They’ve been less than enthusiastic about lots of the math we’ve done, so I was excited that they got excited about this.

Of course we had to keep going. Today I added more hearts to our new chart. The filled chart was behind it. “How many do we have now?” I asked. They all agreed we had seven. “I disagree I said. They started to try to convince me I was wrong. It was good to see they are learning some math reasoning skills, but I was right. I pulled out our filled chart and put them side by side. “I think we have 107,” I said.

They had no choice but to agree with me.

I can’t wait to see where this goes tomorrow.

It also helped them become more aware of opportunities to help out. Someone dropped crayons one day and I made a big deal out of adding some hearts for the helper. I truly don’t know if they had ever considered helping a classmate out, especially for a chore like cleaning. I’m happy to report this type of thing has become more common for us.

Repeat

All that stuff I planned for last week went differently than expected. I thought I could interview 4 students per day and finish the whole class. Instead I missed a day because my son was sick and another day because of our Terry Fox walk. Also, I could only interview two students each day because that’s all the time the rest of the class could stay busy.

Despite not reaching my goal I do feel good about the work we did. I’m repeating the plan for the week, just switching out the colour tiles for 3D shapes. Everyone will have a chance to play with those, the pattern blocks, iPads and my new giant “pop it” game board where they practice addition facts. After I interview two friends each day we’ll be talking about attributes of 2D and 3D shapes.

Reflecting on my week really is helpful. I feel like I’m climbing up hill all week and seeing little progress because I can’t meet any of my goals. Taking the time to reflect helps me see that we really are doing good things. Returning to school has been challenging. But not everyone is asking me when they can go home every ten minutes like they were two weeks ago, so I’m taking that as a sign that we’re settling in.

Slow and steady

This week looked a lot like last week. I had no idea it would be so hard for me to slow down my “ease back into school” math routine. Typically by the third week we’re ready to rock and roll. But I am now preparing for week four and it’s more like elevator Muzak than Bon Jovi. I think it’s a good thing.

One of the things that was on my mind a lot is how long it’s taking for some of us to fall back into school mode. It makes sense because the students in my grade 2/3 class haven’t completed a full year of school since kindergarten. A colleague suggested that it might also because it continues to feel like we could be closed again any time – kids can’t trust that we’re going to be here for long because school, for them, has always been uncertain. Makes sense.

We spent time this past week doing dot talks. It was interesting to learn about their thinking. But it was also interesting to learn how they communicate. But it was most interesting for me to see that they don’t think of counting as math. I would think that would stick out as a main component for them.

That’s where I plan to start on Monday: What is math? I’m going to ask them and we’ll talk about it. I hope we can establish that math is playing with numbers, shapes, and information. Should I put “playing” in air quotes? Not sure yet.

I think my number talks will need to be planned after this conversation. I’m predicting I’ll need to show them a few things and do a number talk on a different math area each day – data and graphing one day, geometry one day, number operations another day.

For lessons I think I’m ready to start getting the students ready to split into different groupings. Yes…I’m talking about Guided Math again. I don’t know a whole lot about my mathematicians yet, but I do know they are in many different places.

These are the centres I think I’ll have this week:

*games with cards

*games without cards (no idea what they will be yet!)

*iPads for online activities

*work with Mrs Corbett

Week 1: Done

This week we did many of the same activities I used last September for the first week of school. Namely we measured things that are a meter apart. Once again I was hoping that all I had to do to keep everyone a meter apart is show them how big a meter is. Don’t you love my optimism? Once again, we finished the week still needing practice.

As I sit here today working on my plans for the coming week I’m reflecting on how quickly everyone did fall back into some of the Number Talk routines that are common in my school. I typically have a class mostly inherited from one teacher, but this year it is a mixed group. I’m at a dual-track French/English school and I have more transfer students from French Immersion than I’ve ever had at once. I wasn’t sure how many of them may have used a “thumbs up” for Number Talks, or how many may have discontinued this during online school in the spring.

Last week we did a lot of counting for our Number Talks. I know I originally got this activity from Graham Fletchy, but I cannot find it! Basically I had a plastic cup (noisy) and I dropped small stones into it while making sure they could not see the objects falling. The class had to count as I dropped and then tell how many were in the cup based on what they heard. It’s a great activity that helped us talk about listening closely while also establishing our Number Talk routine. I’m definitely doing the “popping balloons” activity (from Graham Fletchy) this week, and few others I’ll report on next week. I didn’t expect to need to spend time on counting (grade 2 and 3!) but we need it anyway. Many students went right to rote counting and reciting and I want to make sure everyone remembers (and is able) to match a number to a “plunk” in the cup, or to an object they touch or see. I suspect we just need to get back into the groove of school, but one can never tell in September!

This week I will also be plopping everyone online for a few minutes. I want to make sure everyone can sign in and knows where to find our class page. I hope we don’t ever end up back online again, but I need to make sure everyone is ready…just in case!

For our regular lessons, we’ll do some more measuring. Looking at our class numbers I’m predicting some reorganization AND I want to stick with a gentle start to the year. Everyone in grade 2 seems to like measuring.

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.