Academic Contest Winners

1st, 2nd and 3rd Place Word Masters Challenge Winners

Throughout the year, we competed in several academic contests. Medals and awards came in right around the same time for two of them! Congratulations to our Word Masters Challenge Champions! The Word Masters Challenge is an advanced analogy and vocabulary competition and consists of three meets during the school year.

National Honor Roll Winners

Students love being a part of the Noetic Math Competition and the class did awesome in the Spring Meet with 15 students placing in the top 10% nationally. We also had several students who placed in the top 50% nationally and our top six scorers helped us earn a Team Achievement Award. Nationally the class tied for third place. Way to go, Math Maniacs and congratulations to all the students for their hard work and accomplishments this year!

Mystery Money Eggs

This week we combined a few math lessons to learn about money, calculating sums, calculating differences and data analysis via Google sheets. To kick off this lesson, each student received a Mystery Money Egg, opened it, and added up the contents. 

When they were finished with their calculations, they scanned the enclosed QR Code to see if the total they had calculated matched the amount listed on the QR code. None of the QR Codes matched the totals! The next step was for students to figure out the difference between the total listed on the QR Code and the actual total. 

Then students found a partner with the same color egg and combined their totals. They also worked together to add the totals listed on their two QR Codes and found the difference between their combined money totals and the two QR Codes. 

Next, students returned to their original seats and accessed their pvLearners accounts. They learned to create a Google sheet and created a spreadsheet detailing their egg contents. The next step was to share the digital spreadsheet with their Mystery Money Egg partner and me. Partners added another page to their spreadsheet to record the data from the combined eggs. 

Students enjoyed the "mystery" aspect of this lesson and were able to practice somewhat basic math skills and combine them with higher level data tracking and analytics. The Mystery Money Eggs incorporated The Four C's, as students were required to communicate, collaborate and think critically throughout the lesson. The creativity integration came when creating the spreadsheet, as students had choices of fonts, backgrounds, colors, cell size, etc.  

The rubric was reviewed at the beginning and throughout the lesson, so students had a clear understanding of the purpose and how they would be graded. 

Noetic Math Winners

Congrats To Our Honor Roll Awardees!

Earlier this year my class competed in The Noetic Learning Math Contest, which is an advanced, biannual, national math competition for elementary students. The goal of the competition is to encourage students to be interested in math, developing problem solving skills and inspire young learners to excel in math! My class did very well and we had nine students finish in the top 10% nationally, earning a spot on the Noetic Honor Roll. Wow! These students were awarded math medals. We also had many students place in the top 50% nationally, and these students received an Honorable Mention.

For the first time, Noetic also awarded Team Achievement Awards for this competition. My class tied for first place with another class in Georgia. Congrats to all students for being a part of this honor!

Finally, we had the top scorer nationally with a perfect score! We will be participating in the Noetic Math Competition again this Spring. 

Learning Multiplication Facts

Since the start of 2015, we have been working fervently to learn and memorize the multiplication facts, zero through ten. 

In class, we realized there were really only twenty-one facts that we need to know, so we created a video about those facts.

Then we made flashcards of those twenty-one facts and quizzed each other because once we know those, we know ALL of them!

Students had a good time creating their own multiplication themed board game. When they were finished, they played the game with their classmates. 

We decided that the nines were one of the more complicated tables to learn, so we learned a few tricks about the nines. Ask your child to show you the finger trick we learned in class. 

Did you know the digits of the product of a nine factor will add up to nine? For example, 9x3=27 and 2+7=9 and 5x9=45 and 4+5=9! This works on the nines tables one through ten. 

We also determined that the sevens table was a difficult one too, so we created "cootie catchers" to practice the sevens. 

Spending time online doing math drills and playing multiplication games has helped cement these facts in our brains, too! We do a good deal of higher level, multi-step math in class and if students don't have a solid grasp of the multiplication tables, they face unnecessary challenges. These facts are information students will need to know for the rest of their academic career (at the minimum) and once they are memorized, it makes the rest of math quite a bit easier. The best way to memorize these facts is to practice, practice, practice! Flashcards, xtramath.org, practice tests and multiplication games are great ways to practice.

On the first day we took the test, not a single student was able to answer 100 questions correctly in three minutes or less. Just a few weeks later, eleven of our twenty-two students have finished the test scoring 100% in three-minutes or less, and are now working on much more advanced math during the daily drill. We will be drilling for another month or so, so keep practicing! 

Pumpkins

We have had a spooktacular time this week with our Prime Pumpkin Prediction Project! 

Students learned about circumference, radius, vertical lines, estimation, alliteration, units of measure, the life-cycle of a pumpkin and of course the grand finale, estimating and counting the seeds of a pumpkin. Thanks again to all the families who donated pumpkins. Watch the video below to see a little snippet of the seed counting fun. 

I create most of my videos on iMovie on a Macbook. On a whim, I decided to try out the iMovie iPad app. I was confused and am thrilled to say, I had a group of 1st and 2nd grade students guide me through creating this video! This is what they learned during our Apple Store field trip and they were obviously paying attention! Great job, students! I was excited to learn something new and am eager to use this iPad app more in the future. 

Differentiated Lessons via Front Row Math

You may have heard your 1st or 2nd grade student talking about something called "Front Row" when they get home from school. No, this doesn't mean I have rearranged the desks (again!) and he or she is sitting in the front row. Front Row Math is a fairly new online math program that accurately isolates skills and gaps with every student. Then, it fills the gaps and builds on student strengths.

My favorite feature of Front Row is that it is adaptive. This allows students to work at their own pace on skills that are relevant to each student. During our math block I have been pulling students who are at the same or very similar levels and working with them either individually or in small groups. I am able to view data and reports through Front Row so I can see exactly what a student is struggling with or excelling in. So far I have found this data to be extremely accurate!

The students enjoy Front Row because it is gamified! When they get questions correct the earn coins and stars. Every so often the Front Row pig makes an appearance and students can spend their coins on items for the pig. From a teacher's point of view, I love that there is a game feature to keep students excited and engaged, but I also love that the game feature is minimal and limited so students are not able to spend excessive time playing games while not actually learning any math.

While students are working independently on Front Row and get stuck, there are a few options for them. My favorite way for them to get un-stuck is for them to watch a short, one-minute video which reviews exactly what they are having a challenge with. The videos go step by step to help students figure out what they need to learn or what they might be forgetting.

What has created the biggest buzz in education this year? That's right: Common Core Standards! Front Row Math is common core aligned. This program covers common core K-8 standards so students can work well above their current grade level, while still staying on track.

It's Never To Early To Start Learning Math!

Front Row is totally cloud based and students can use it on nearly any device including Chromebooks, iPads (there is a free app), MacBooks, etc. I explore a LOT of technology programs and am lucky I have the freedom and flexibility to be very choosy. Front Row is the best math program I have found so far to accurately differentiate math with my extremely unique group of gifted learners! Students are welcome to log in any time at home and show you what it is all about or use it on the weekends or evenings if they are looking to advance their skills on their own. The link for students to use is: https://student.frontrowed.com and our class code is lztsbw.

Geometry with Candy and QR Codes

We have been working on a geometry unit in math class!

Students learned about lines, rays and angles and got to demonstrate what each was using toothpicks, marshmallows and candy corn. 

Later in the unit, students used an iPad to scan assorted QR Codes. Each QR Code brought them to different information about a shape including an image of the shape, the definition of the shape and properties of the shape. Each student created a chart of all the different shapes we learned and included all of this information. 

Place Value

We recently began a unit on place value and number sense.

Students created a chart listing and labeling place value.

The chart will be graded according to a rubric, which was thoroughly explained before we began the project. 

Celebrating Pi Day

 We celebrated Pi Day by creating bracelets with beads representing each digit of pi (and a small, black bead to represent the decimal point.) 

We worked with our 5th and 6th grade buddy class during this project because they are truly experts on pi and were able to teach us a lot! We had a class discussion about this magical number and talked about that it is a transcendental number and also an irrational number. 

After creating a Pi Bracelet, pairs of buddies worked together using the Tellegami app to create a video about pi. 

Last but certainly not least, we measured the circumference of several pies, sang happy birthday to pi and enjoyed a delicious slice of pie! 

We Are 100 Days Smarter!

 Where is this school year going? It is hard to believe we have already reached the 100th day of school, but we did! It was a day worthy of celebrating!

 One of our most fun activities was each student counted out 100 mini marshmallows and created geometric shapes. Students got very creative and many attempted to build a dodecahedron. 

We also counted out 100 Froot Loops and made a necklace! The entire classroom smelled delicious during this activity! It was very interesting to see the different patterns and designs on each necklace.

Another hands on project we did was taking the digits one, zero and zero and turning them into something else. Students got very creative and we had ladybugs, owls, airplanes, black holes and lots of other unique ideas!

Throughout the day we also wrote hundreds of words, solved 100 math problems, created math problems with the answer 100 and illustrated what we might look like when we are 100 years old. Happy 100th Day of School!

Sensational Snowflake Symmetry

We have been learning about symmetry in math class. We created paper snowflakes to demonstrate this concept.

So far we have discussed lines of symmetry, rotational symmetry, reflectional symmetry and asymmetry. 

Later this week students will take a post assessment to demonstrate their mastery of symmetry.

National Math Champions

Congratulations To Our Team Winner!

Last month my class competed in The Noetic Learning Math Contest, which is an advanced, biannual, national math competition for elementary students. The goal of the competition is to encourage students to be interested in math, developing problem solving skills and inspire young learners to excel in math!

National Honor Roll Winners

My class did very well and we had eleven students finish in the top 10% nationally. Wow! These students were awarded math medals. We also had many students place in the top 50% nationally, and these students received an Honorable Mention.

Weighing Pumpkins

Yesterday each student weighed the pumpkin they are working with this week. 

We realized we couldn't just put the pumpkin on the bathroom scale I brought in from home. (We tried! It didn't work.) So we brainstormed as a class to figure out how we could determine the weight of each pumpkin.

Using problem solving strategies, we figured out if we weighed ourselves, and then weighed ourselves holding the pumpkin, we could subtract our weight from our weight holding a pumpkin and get the weight of the pumpkin. 

Pumpkin Math

We have been using pumpkins to learn some valuable math skills!

First we learned what the word circumference meant and brainstormed different ways to measure the circumference of a pumpkin. Several students thought using a ruler would work so we tried that. It did not work. One student suggested using a cloth measuring tape, which was a wonderful idea except that we did not have any measuring tapes. 

We finally realized we could use a piece of string and wrap it around the thickest part of the pumpkin. Then we used our rulers to measure the string. We also estimated, counted and measured the vertical lines on our pumpkins. We compared the number of lines of larger pumpkins and smaller pumpkins. This week we will continue pumpkin math by weighing our pumpkins and figuring out their radius.