Monday night and I just realized I never posted a reflection for last week! It was sort of normal, not very exciting week. I’m headed into a week of guided math in which I’ll be working with small groups to do sone learning about money (not very exciting) and everyone will be at other centres solidifying their math facts by playing math games.

It’ll be fine.

But last week I did notice how often our calendar is being accessed by kids. I saw a blog post this summer (I’ll try to find the link!) and decided I would display the whole calendar on our wall this year. I put up the 10 school months and then started the year, intending to find time to make it fancy.

One week in somebody added his birthday. Then we had to add everyone’s birthday. We added assemblies a field trips. During the first week of October somebody asked how many days until Halloween, so we added all of our major holidays, which lead to a lot of other holidays being added. There is a steady stream of people at the calendar counting how many days until this or that. The calendar has lead to many one-to-one conversations about time, counting forward and back, and important days for our classmates. (News flash: not everyone celebrates Christmas! This was news for many of my students.)

I’ve also been creating PicCollages of class photos to create a visual timeline. I need to get October printed! (Ugh!) it’s fun to look back at those memories too.

I haven’t done a class calendar in years. I thought it took too much time and space. But this very casual calendar, with no forced routine for its use, has been such a great addition to our class!

Birthday Graph

Can you imagine not remembering when your birthday is?  The struggle is real for many 7 and 8 year olds I know.  Combine that with the fact that I have set a goal of visiting and resisting graphing often this year  (my goal now is once a month) and you’ve got a good first week of school activity.

Today we went outside for math, and we created a graph of our birthdays using a jump rope and some paper.  Here is some of our work, with student names cleverly disguised of course.

We used the rope to form the x and y axis. It allowed us to do some revision so everything would fit.

I did have to look up the birthdays of a few friends.  But tomorrow we are going transfer this giant graph to a small corner of a bulletin board and then I’ll never have to look them up again!  (ha)

The thing that amazed me most was that as soon as the graph started to take shape, I started to hear students comment on  what they were seeing.  “July is the most popular month to be born in our class.” and “I was born in the same month as Mrs. Corbett!” It was a lot of fun, gave me some insight into how much they know about graphing, an also showed me some learning skills we need to look at.