Thursday, May 4, 2017

Hockey Hijinks

 
Image from here.

It's a great day AND a great week for hockey movie fun!  (Although we didn't do as much as last week due to testing and other activities.)

Here's your weekly update! :-)

Jersey Mania: Last week, the students designed their own jerseys for our two teams.  On Monday, I took all of the jerseys for my class and mounted them on bulletin board paper.  The Stars are on one color paper and the Capitals are on another color paper. Each of the first grade classes received two different color stickers.  They are going to put one sticker on their favorite Stars jersey and one sticker on their favorite Capitals jersey.  The same thing will happen with Mr. Racosky's class, but the other fourth grade classes will choose from those.  Then we will take our 4 winners.  One of the two jerseys per team will be our actual jersey.  The other design for each team will be our spirit wear!

More Authentic Math: In addition to working on their jerseys last week, the students also started the process of solving a problem:  How many chairs can we fit in the room we'll be using for our movie theater?  We continued our journey in answering that question this week.

On Monday, I took my class to the room we will use.  Each student had a template that was made by the group that came up with it.  I reminded the students of our end goal.  I then said, "Last week, you all learned that you could measure three parts of the chair.  What were they?"  As I was drawing a chair in a flipchart, they told me the answers. (Height, length, and width)  I told them they were going to measure two of those in the room with the template.  One of my girls told me we were not going to measure the height.  I asked her why she thought that and she exclaimed, "We don't need to measure how high up the chairs will go!"
Next, the students had to collaborate and communicate how they were going to measure the width of the room.  I didn't give them any other directions or any parameters. Some students started putting them in a row across right away.  Some students put them in random spots around the room until they saw the ones up front and decided to move them.  After their templates were down, I told them to look at what they put down - some of their templates were right next to each other and some had a little bit of space in between.  They needed to talk and decide which way they were gong to have it.  They decided to push the templates right next to each other.  They counted how many templates fit across (17) and I recorded it on the board.  I told them, "Ok, do the same thing to figure out the length."  This happened so quickly, I didn't have time to take pictures!  They came up with ten chairs for the length.








They ended up skip counting by 10s 17 times to figure out the answer.  I then threw in area and how they could have multiplied - which I modeled for them, but told them they would learn that in 3rd grade too! :-)  *Their eyes always bug out when I teach them something they will learn in another grade.  It's so adorable!*


I used ActivInspire to create a model of the room for them - exactly how they made it.  I left a little aisle by the door.  I asked what they noticed about the model.  They quickly said, "At the movie theater, they have more than one aisle!" I asked them what they thought we should do. They quickly and eagerly responded with "Remove rows from the other side!"  After some discussion, they told me we should take two rows of ten away.  I asked how many that is and they responded with twenty.  We then did some subtraction. (170-20) I had them tell me how to solve the problem.  


After I took the two rows away, I had them tell me what else they noticed about the aisles.  "They aren't the same size on both sides!"  "What should we do class?"  They told me to take another row of ten away.  (More subtraction!  150-10)

Then they observed we should have a middle aisle!  They decided to take two rows of ten away from the middle.  (140-20!)



There is still a lot of math left to do to solve our problem.  We will continue this next week!

Script Writing:  Our two classes took our initial story and expanded on it.  We added lots of details - feelings, actions, and some dialogue.  Before we started doing that, I went through the story and wrote questions at various parts.  "What should they be doing to show they are ready?"  "How will we know they are sad?" "What are some of the things they can do during practice?"  All of the students had great ideas. 

We had help from other students in the school too!  A fifth grade boy is on a youth hockey team.  He came down and told us what goes on at hockey practices.  We also had help from 3 third grade girls.  Their class has worked on composing an original opera this year.  (Their teacher does this every year and the process and outcome is AMAZING!)  These girls are the script writers.  They read through the script and how it marked up with questions, comments, and suggestions!   It was truly amazing!  One of the girls said several times how much she loved our story line!  One of my girls said, "They're smart!  They should be in our movie!" :-)




I almost forgot: Our players now have their last names and their numbers!

We still have a lot to do before the project is complete,  but we are continuing to work hard!  Just like the kids in our movie, we aren't going to give up!  We're going to give it our best shot!

Thank you again for stopping by and I hope you enjoyed our update!

As always, you can find my previous entries about hockey here:

Enjoy your weekend! :-)

~Stacey~

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