Hands on Math: week 1

Thanks to Pinterest I found the Math Coach's corner. Seriously, what did we do before Pinterest?
Ms. Donna is a K-5 instructional Math coach and posts a lot of her great ideas for getting kids to understand and enjoy Math. Inspired I decided to try and do a hands on Math project each day as well as our regular Math lesson. Miss K was not a fan of math last year and while Math in Focus has helped her attitude it could still use some help! I really want to show the Piwis how math is used in the real world.
We only did it on Monday and Tuesday this week because Miss K came down with Bronchitis. Poor thing wasn't up to much for the rest of the week.

The Math projects are part of 'Team Piwi' which is what we are calling the activities the Piwi's can do together.

Monday:

Miss K needed to find a way to fairly sort 12 Jellybeans into three jars. She did this and then explained how she did it mentally by looking at them and seeing 3 groups of 4. We then wrote it down together and I explained it as an introduction to the concept of division.
While I worked with Mini Piwi on her version of this activity, Miss K, completed the fraction component of the lesson to review what we were talking about last week.

Mini Piwi sorted her Jelly beans by color and then we counted them. Sorry for some reason this picture rotates when I upload it!

Tuesday 

Last week we began with Grade 2 Metric measurement in our Math in Focus Curriculum. To practice  Measuring skills we set up an experiment to test how far differently folded paper airplanes would fly. I love doing the measurement units because it Math AND science. It has inspired me to begin working on a Lapbook.
I had thought about doing it outside with water balloons but it was pretty chilly this week and Mini Piwi is still getting over her cold. We found different paper plane folding instructions and made several each.

Throwing the first plane from the starting line

Measuring the distance the plane fly and learning the importance of using the ruler the correct way up

 


 

The Wonderful wizard of Oz literature unit

Miss K enjoyed watching the original MGM wizard of OZ movie last year. This week we began reading the book by L. Frank Baum. It is amazing that kids and adults alike have been enjoying this story for over 100 years.

Within minutes of starting the book Miss K spotted a difference. Dorothy is given silver shoes not ruby red ones. Later, after bedtime I did a quick google check. Somehow, I missed the 70 year old memo that the MGM movie screenplay was very different to Baum's book. Miss K is enjoying the story but is pretty much convinced the book is wrong. Her skepticism is in part because she recalls we bought the book on clearance and is convinced  it was on sale because it is not the real version.I showed her the google article and Miss k pointed out that i had told her that not everything you see on TV or the computer is true. Wow I suppose I should have anticipated that one. I tried to explain again but (as i felt gray hairs growing) decided sometimes you need to learn something for yourself and no amount of convincing is going to help.

For now we are reading the book and then at the end we will watch the movie and compare and contrast the two.
Thankfully I didn't even need to come up with the Venn Diagram template. Walking by the way has included one in their Wizard of oz pack

I am working on the rest of the notebook pages for this unit.
Included are:

• A mini unit on Tornadoes -an extension of our weather science unit
• A shoe themed language mini unit
• Wizard of oz pack: create your own Oz character, word find, comprehension questions and copy work
• Character studies
• Lessons from the story
• Book report: Chapter timeline, Setting and ending

So far the links I have found for my printables:
Book sequencing template for chapter summary Free @TpT

Story retelling cards @ First grade parade

Home school Creations also have a Wizard of OZ tot pack I was thinking of using since Mini Piwi has been enjoying the story and cute illustrations too. The characters in the tot pack are so cute that Miss K would probably like them in her notebook too.

Shared with

Miss K's drawing lessons

'Perry the cute-a-pus' drawn by Miss K using kidsfront.com 

Both Piwis love to draw and paint. Miss K wanted to learn more. Unfortunately, both her parents have limited artistic abilities and NZ Grandma isn't able to fly 10000 miles for a lesson.

There are art classes in the area but we aren't able to commit to much this summer with the possibility of a move. I did what I usually do...turned to google.
I found some great sites that you can use to draw with your mouse or graphic pen -saves the cost of software and the risk of downloading dodgy applications!
A caveat though,  I learnt that not all of these are kid appropriate. Some require you to log in with an account so you can store the images and they have galleries of images that other people have created. Some of these are not G rated. The sites we liked...

Online Sketch pad is not specially for kids but the few user submitted examples are chosen by the site to be 'ok'.

Picturedraw is an doodle pad. It is fairly basic and you can save images to your computer. There are no user images on the site, but there are some google ads.

free-draw by Nick Jr, is for younger kids but still a lot of fun, you can print the art work

Paint Go!  This is similar to the Nick Jr site, but may be preferred by kids who don't want the Nick Jr themes

What Miss K really wanted was something to teach her how to draw different animals etc. Google delivered!

Billybear 4 kids has written lessons about drawing, an art pad, clip art...They have a lot of things about Internet security on the site itself and some lessons for kids to be safe on the Internet. I was however, not so thrilled with some of the banner advertising that popped up in the visits we made. I got wise though and just bring up the site that Miss K wants and then refresh it until a G rated one comes up before she begins her lesson. (wow who would have thought I'd be worried about ten years ago!).

kidsfront.com was Miss K's favorite. The how to draw section step by step drawing lessons. It doesn't require any reading like Billy Bear so younger kids could follow the visual steps. It too has several ads.

Miss K has enjoyed herself so much she now wants me to find lessons for unicorns, clothes and shoes..oh Google!....