August 1st Means School is Right Around the Corner

 

As I sit on my overstuffed armchair, looking out the window, listening to Koda (my Chiweenie) and Sir Winston (the terrier I am watching for the weekend) bark at birds, in the back of my mind school creeps in.  I have two classrooms to get ready, two schedules to create, and lists of activities to think about and implement.   

Half of me wants to drive right over to my school and get to work, but the other half is saying, "Wait a minute! Think through this a moment... don't burn out because you have ten months to go!"  It's always that way for me when August hits.

I want to revisit the books I was reading about Building Thinking Classrooms, Math Talk, and I know a new curriculum is coming for reading.  This year will be stressful for many of my friends because of the new curriculum.  It's always hard implementing something new when you have 25 kids sitting in front of you and you are learning as you go. 

 My job will be to learn the curriculum as well, because I will need to supplement and push and find holes in my students' learning that the content doesn't cover. In my current role as a SAGE teacher, or gifted  support, we don't have the curriculum that everyone else does.  This is a gift and a curse.  We are always searching for amazing units to engage and challenge our learners, who need something different every year.  It's wonderful because I can meet my students' interests, needs, and exact learning right where they are.  It's a curse because I am always needing to research, learn, hunt, and find new resources.  In the long run, I enjoy that hunt so the roll serves me well. 

I am feeling excited to see the kids again though. I like learning with them, hearing about their summers, experimenting with math and science, seeing coding projects, and reading books together.  I am looking forward to our time together and collaborating again.  Yes, the school year is around the corner, and now that I am refreshed a bit, we will tackle it together. 

Summer Workbooks for Gifted

 Are you concerned about the summer academic slide and want your student to be working on a little bit of math each day to push their thinking?  I have created summer workbooks for gifted students.  The workbooks are designed to help students push their thinking and communication skills with a page a day during the summer months.

The workbook is designed for students to solve open ended problems in more than one way, find as many solutions as possible to push their thinking, understand algebraic equations and create their own story problems. 

One page can last up to half an hour of work and students cannot race through the packet as soon as possible if the parent asks for multiple solution pathways.  The workbook pages are very similar to the problems that we do on whiteboards in partners in SAGE, which is our gifted math program in the Issaquah School District.  

They can be done in partners at home, are great for teams of students who want to stretch their learning, and want to collaborate.

Here is the link to the summer workbook: Happy learning!

Integration of Math, Science, and Commerce: Paper Towel Testing

 Lately, my fourth graders have been put to work.  They have watched some incredibly entertaining commercials from Bounty to Brawny and begun to assess what makes a great paper towel. 

 "What is the task?" you ask.

Find the ultimate best paper towel brand.  Students have been using the scientific method to design their own experiments to prove mathematically that one paper towel brand is superior to the others.  

I have witnessed 10 year olds measuring water weight in grams, calculating averages, repeating trials, and drawing conclusions about absorbency.  Other students have placed heavy weights and objects on paper towels until they crashed down and broke to understand what role strength has in various brands.  

Finally, no paper towel evaluation would be complete without considering the cost per sheet for paper towels.

It appears that the school brand, Wausau, is not holding up on the strength and absorbency factors, but will it win due to cost? Stay tuned to find out the final conclusions from our paper towel stand off.

Counting Collections

 "Yes! I can't wait to count!" is what I have been hearing this week.  My kinders come into my room and get straight to work.  

"What is their task?" you ask.  Counting Collections in the answer.

I have a variety of jars and containers of objects.  Some are filled to the brim and others are half full.  The goal is to figure out how many objects there are all together.  

 

My students are counting in a variety of ways, tens, twenties, fifties, fives, etc.  They are learning to label, organize their thinking, check their work, and they are trying to figure out the total number of objects in all the jars combined.  

We are working into the thousands at this point and my little guys are determined to solve this counting collections mystery.  

I have learned a lot about my new friends.  Some already know the algorithm to carry and others are fabulous at manipulating numbers, re-combining them, and problem solving in different ways.  We are learning to compare answers, check with each other, check our own work, and try to understand someone else's thinking. 

It's fun to ask the kinders, "Look at M.'s work. How do you think they solved this problem?" And then they have to walk through someone else's steps and try to explain.  I am pretty sure they have never done this before, and watching them interact with each other in kind ways has been entertaining.  

I have a regular little counting business happening on my back carpet and I love it.  Tomorrow we will be over 1,100.  The look on the kids faces will be priceless. 

If you're interested in the counting collections lesson plans, you can click here.

WAETAG Gifted Conference and SEL

 

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to present at the WAETAG gifted conference.  My friend and coworker, Cameron, is on the board and asked me to give a speech on math discourse.  I was pretty nervous about it, as I always want to do my best in front of a group if people and it can be intimidating presenting in front of people who you don't know.

Luckily, my friend and TOSA (Teacher on Special Assignment) Rowena, was kind and gracious and willing to present with me.  She has so much background knowledge about best math practices and research, that it was very helpful to have her as a co-presenter.  She is also very positive and puts a smile on my face. 

Rowena and I developed a presentation that included Math Talk Images, 3 Act Math Routines, and also Choral Counting.  The people readily shared, talked with one another, and before long we became a small math community- if even for a little bit.  Participants talked about connections to Building Thinking Classrooms and thought about how the classroom inquiry process is flipped in a thinking classroom.  We dug into some math together, and then had a little bit of time to work as well.

As I was presenting, I reflected on how important math talk really is.  My students are from Issaquah and Sammamish and many of them have lots of advantages.  They live in wealthy areas, they often time have lots of love and support at home and get to go to math competitions, clubs, dances, sports, tutors, etc.  They are extremely bright.  The world is their oyster, so to say.  So, I think it is so important that my students in particular learn how to communicate effectively and kindly, because one day they will be running the companies and the meetings and making decisions tomorrow that could affect all of our future.  

I believe that we need citizens who listen, are compassionate and caring, and who are creative and can think outside of the box to solve problems.  Ultimately, these are the values I hope my students walk away from my class cultivating and math talk, a time to discuss, disagree kindly, think critically, is one way to cultivate those goals. This is my "Why." This is why I teach gifted kids, presented at the conference, and come to school everyday.  I hope to help make a small impact in someone's life to nudge them in this direction.

If you are looking for SEL Learning targets, click here.

If you are looking for a Math Talk Behavior Reflection checklist, click here.

If you would like to see our WAETAG presentation on Math Talk, click here.

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.