Gifted Kinders Start

Yay!  Today was the first day of kindergarteners coming to group! I walked across the hall and saw the adorable glowing face of M. and picked up sweet J. in the room next to me and off we went.  

Seeing as I only had a half an hour, I had to make the most of my time with the kiddos.  We sat crisscross applesauce on the carpet of rainbow stripes and started with one of my favorite books, Beautiful Oops.  It was the perfect way to open a new group, as we talked about how it was okay to make mistakes, learn from them, and move on.  

The kids both smiled and squealed with delight (and so did I) as we saw fun mistakes being turned into creative and interesting pieces of art.  As an extension, I asked the students if they would prefer to make art out of their own beautiful oops marks or if they wanted to do math.  

Ultimately, my new kids enthusiasm for math won out.  We went to the whiteboards and begun our work right away.  I put the problem _____ + ______ + _____ = 10 on the board, and we immediately began to find solutions with multiple addends.  The kids were searching for as many solutions as they could find and grew in excitement with each discovery.  

What ended up happening, is that the kids starting building off each other's ideas and connections in strategies that generated many solutions.  These patterns and rules that the kids were discovering were fantastic ways to have deep conversation about math and think more critically about our work together. 

 Math Practice 7 (looking for patterns) and Math Practice 8 (explaining rules) are some of the easiest ways to go deeper.  We were able to analyze this one problem for 20 minutes and the kids were itching to explore more with subtraction.  

It was such a fun way to start the year and I am so glad I get to work with these great kids!  I'm looking forward to more math with them in the future. 

If you are looking for more open problems like the ones I described here, you can check out my resources here:  

Analyzing Our Dry Ice Data

My students successfully created dry ice bubbles out of three various solutions last week.  They created a bubble solution out of lemon scented Dawn dish soap, another out of Palmolive, a mixture of the two, a solution with additional glycerin, and a final one out of school brand soap.  They placed the dry ice in bubble machines that they engineered and created bubbles full of carbon dioxide from the dry ice.

Soon, I watched as my fifth graders were gleefully bouncing bubbles on cloth and counting the number of bounces per bubble.  We did multiple trials in our science inquiry and soon had data for all soap types.  What do you do with gifted students and lots of data?  You analyze of course!

Today we began to analyze the data using measurement standards.  Students found data landmarks like the mean, median, mode, range, maximum and minimum.  They also began to graph their data in line plots, box and whisker plots, and also histograms in order to prove which dish soap brand was the best.  Students examined their averages and maximums and looked for outliers in their data to prove their thinking and push their analysis to the next level. 

We are still finishing our conclusion paragraphs tomorrow and making sure our findings are scientifically accurate.  This was a great way to go deeper in the measurement standards as the students were able to apply their mathematical understanding to a new concept as they engineered the boo bubbler, created bubble solution mixtures with L, mL, grams, and weight, and now are graphing and interpreting findings from labs.