Monday morning, Tom shared the book, Pattern Fish, by Trudy Harris and colorfully illustrated by Anne
Canevari Green. The loosely rhyming text
describes six ocean creatures moving through the sea happily, until a shark
comes along and scares them all away.
There are numerous verbal and pictorial patterns throughout the
book. The students learned that a
pattern repeats again and again. They
were introduced to the following pattern types: AB, AAB, ABB and ABC.
The students were then asked to collect various objects from around the room and make a particular pattern with the objects while their classmates took turns trying to name the pattern they tried to replicate.
Soon each student will record results in a spreadsheet, so that we can represent our data with graphs.
On Monday the students in Natasha's math group began learning how to tell time using an analog clock. We made a number line and then turned the line into a circle on the floor to create a clock. Students practiced telling time to the hour. I asked the students to work on memorizing the face of the clock. On Wednesday they worked on the i-pads with the telling time app called Jungle Time.
Today we talked about the minute hand and practiced identifying how many minutes the minute hand is pointing to. If a student wasn't sure of the minutes, they could look under the hour number to see the minutes number.
As an example, here a student was able to tell us the minute hand was pointing to 40 minutes.
The students were then asked to collect various objects from around the room and make a particular pattern with the objects while their classmates took turns trying to name the pattern they tried to replicate.
Joan’s group is using dreidels to study probability. We talked about the tops used for the traditional Hanukkah game of dreidel and what we would expect with a fair dreidel. Students said that each of the four sides should have an equal chance of coming up. A few talked about how they want gimel to come up the most. Then we speculated about why one side might come up more than the others. Students thought about how the dreidels were made, about whether the letters were painted on or were on the side in relief, and about how the dreidel behaves when it is spun. I shared that to get an accurate picture of how fair a type of dreidel is, we need to have a lot of spins. In our study we are comparing plastic and wooden dreidels to see if one type is more consistently fair than the other. Students are spinning the dreidels in class and at home for homework.
On Monday the students in Natasha's math group began learning how to tell time using an analog clock. We made a number line and then turned the line into a circle on the floor to create a clock. Students practiced telling time to the hour. I asked the students to work on memorizing the face of the clock. On Wednesday they worked on the i-pads with the telling time app called Jungle Time.
