1. Enjoy yourself!
2. Stay still and relax.
3. Speak loudly and clearly.
4. Don't cover your face!
5. Look at the audience.
6. Don't crinkle your paper!
These are a wonderful list of guidelines that I hope to use in future show and tells as well as the upcoming poetry slam next week.
For the poetry slam, Ms. Allison and I hope to have students practice their poems (which is a blues song!) at home. We will send home the stanzas of the students' poems on Tuesday and the students will be assessed on Wednesday. From there students will vote on which 2 will represent G1B for the poetry slam on Friday (I will also be taking into account how they fared on the assessment as well.) All students are excited at the prospect of competing for prizes!
Mathematics.
Risako's method (commutative property): Risako was the first to notice that for addition, you will arrive at the same answer if you are using the same parts of a whole. It does not matter what order they are in! This is really good for answering questions that are the same quickly (no need for two sets of computations.) For example:
9 + 8 =
8 + 9 =
We have the same parts so we only need to solve one to get the answer for both of them!
9+ 8 = 17 so 8 + 9 = 17.
Lilia's method (making 10's for subtraction.): This was very tricky for students and required us to work with physical objects to visualise how we are working with the number. We used these 3 steps to complete our problems.
1. Break up the number into tens and ones.
2. Choose which number to subtract from.
3. Add what's left.
So for the sum of 15 - 8 we would break our 15 into 10 and 5.
(10 + 5) - 8
Then we would try to subtract the 8 from the ones (which we can't do, it's too small.) So we subtracted the 8 from the 10.
(10-8) + 5
Lastly we need to add the remainder.
2 + 5 = 7.
Ooof! Nasty! We spent extra lessons practicing this strategy and we'll probably keep going next week too! A lot of students were asking why we would use this strategy when we could just count back quicker (fair point!) We are teaching the students to become for flexible in their understanding of place value to help prepare them for more complicated methods like the substitution method we will study later!
Writing.
By G1B.
I was riding my bike,
and I fell down.
I was riding my bike,
and I fell down.
I hit my leg,
and I shouted Ow!
Reading.
One area that we spent a bit of time on and we will definitely revisit is askinf effective questions. This is a skill the students will be using all through their education career. We focussed on open ended questions for our lesson as they make the listeners give longer answers (open ended questions are 'wh' questions.) I was impressed that the students were able to come up with 3 different kinds of questions for our reading of 'Matilda' by Roald Dahl. We will continue our work with questions and helping the students set up their reading groups and giving feedback throughout the coming weeks!
Science.
How can we redirect light onto the ceiling (without touching the light source.)
We had a lot of ideas about how this could be achieved (with one student pointing out that light is already bouncing off the ceiling) before settling on mirrors. The students found that mirrors reflect light back in the opposite direction. We then discovered that angling the mirror changed the angle the light bounced off. We then looked at how we could make the light move without touching the source. The very eloquent question the students had to answer was:
How can have a disco party?
The answer? Move the mirror not the light. Unfortunately some of the students were unfamiliar with disco (shame on you parents!) which meant that I had to educate the students about how to, 'Blame it on the boogie.'
Next week we will begin our Social Studies unit before resuming science later on.