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:

Hockey Entry #1

Hockey Entry #2

Hockey Entry #3

Hockey Entry #4

Hockey Entry #5
Hockey Entry #6
Hockey Entry #7
Hockey Entry #8
 

Enjoy your weekend! :-)

~Stacey~

Eat, Sleep, Teach Hockey

Image from here.

After my last blog entry, my co-worker exclaimed, "Your blog is so filled with your voice and enthusiasm!"  (Thanks Barb!!) I love what I do and I love sharing what I do!  I do my best to inspire students everyday and if I can also inspire other educators, that makes me even happier!  Teaching definitely isn't easy - otherwise EVERYONE would be doing it!

This week has been a BLAST!

First things first:  WE HAVE A TITLE FOR OUR MOVIE!!!!!

After several rounds of voting, the title of our movie is Hockey Stars Showdown!

The students and I are VERY excited!!!

Jersey Mania: On Thursday, I issued a challenge to my class and Mr. Racosky's 4th graders:  Create a jersey for each of our teams.  Our teams are the Stars and the Capitals. 

Each jersey must include the team name and team logo.  They weren't allowed to use logos from NHL teams.  They also had to take into consideration the names of the teams.  The students already knew the definition of stars, but capital was more difficult so we discussed three meanings of that word.  They also looked at jerseys from the NHL just to get an idea of what they looked like.  Then they got started! 

 

As of this update, most of the students are finished.  Once all of the students are done, it's voting time.  Props to Sue, Toia, and Barb for their suggestions / ideas on how the students should vote!  You ladies are awesome!

Image from here.

Authentic math - the focus of professional development at my school this year.  When I did my rainforest projects, I could only do so much with math.  It was mainly related to height, length, and weight of the animals and plants.  This year, authentic math comes easily when learning about hockey and creating a movie theater!

The other day, the students started to figure out how many chairs could fit in the room that we'll be using as our movie theater.  Since then, the students picked how they were going to measure and created their templates in small groups.

Today, I told the students to look at all of their templates their group made.  They had to choose the template that would help out the best.  They took to putting each chair on top of their template to test it out.  Each group gave me their best template.   They looked closely at each other's templates.   They discussed the pros and cons of using that one as their main template.  They put the chairs on top of the templates to see how they compared.

Afterwards, I told the students that all of their templates were AMAZING.  They did what they were supposed to do - figure out a way to see how many chairs could fit in the room.  Now, they had to choose the template that would help them the most in measuring.  I made sure to tell them that just because their template isn't chosen, it doesn't mean it's a bad template.  I reiterated again how good all of the templates were.

I created a flipchart where students could come up and drag a copy of a picture to the template they were voting for.  I had the templates on the floor near the flipchart.  They were SO cute when they were coming up to vote.  They looked very carefully at the each template and thought super hard about which one would be the best measuring tool.

We now have our template.  That group whose template was chosen created a bunch more of that exact template so that we can measure next week!

Image from here.

I have to brag - I am incredibly lucky!  I work with AMAZING, creative, helpful, and supportive people! They say it takes a village to raise a child and it is so true!  I've received suggestions and help from more than a dozen of my coworkers and endless support from another dozen.  We are all pieces of the same puzzle at work and their contributions have been vital to the success of this project!  I am very grateful for their helping hands!

With that, I bid you adieu!

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

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

Hockey Entry #1

Hockey Entry #2

Hockey Entry #3

Hockey Entry #4

Hockey Entry #5
Hockey Entry #6
Hockey Entry #7
 

Enjoy your weekend! :-)

~Stacey~

Hockey, Movie Making, and Movie Theaters, Oh My! :-)

     Image from here

When my students and I first started this project, my immediate thought was, "Okay, I can teach them about hockey. Yes, I'm still learning about it, but it should be easy to teach.  Making a movie theater, I can totally do that too!  How in the world are we going to actually write a script and record this movie?  Oh my gosh! Am I in over my head?"  Well, yes, I am in over my head - and I'm loving every minute of it!

When my class and Mr. Racosky's class met after break, we started reading about script writing.  The book we read is called Cool Scripts & Acting:  How to Stage Your Very Own Show.  You can purchase the book here.  They have a whole series of Cool Performances books.  The students learned a lot.  Some of the things they learned about were

• The parts of a script
• Stage directions
• Saying things in different ways (happy, sad, excited, mad, annoyed, etc...)
• Projecting your voice
• Stage whisper

We had a lot of fun saying things in different ways! They are really good at it!  We are still working on projecting our voices and using a stage whisper!

Image from here

The second time we met last week, the students worked in pairs or groups of 3 and wrote out possible titles for our movies.  I told the students to really think about our story line.  The title should be reflect what our movie is about.  I will be compiling all of their suggestions into a flipchart and the students will be voting on their favorite title.

We also spent some time editing our story.  We had a bunch of places where it said "they" did something or "this player passed to another player," but we didn't have any names.  We now have all of our characters first names. (Last names will come at another time.)

I've been collaborating with our art teacher on things we need to make for our movie.  The students created a list of everything we need to make and I gave it to our art teacher.  We've come up with some very creative ways of making things! :-)

Image from here

One of the things my colleagues and I have been working really hard on this year, is making math more authentic with real life scenarios.  Over spring break I emailed our staff development teacher about our movie theater.  One of the things the students will have to figure out is how many chairs can fit in the room that we're going to use for our movie theater.  This will then help us know how many classes we can have at one time.  She and I met and worked on turning this into several Drexel style math problems.  

The students started working on the problems today!  I took the students to the room we will be in and split them up into groups.  Each group received 1 chair, cubes, yardsticks, rulers, construction paper, whiteboards, markers, and erasers.  

First, I had the students explore their materials.  I asked them what they thought they would be using the materials for.  The students responded with "To make things we don't have for our movie," and "To measure the chair."

That led me to ask the question, "Why might we need to measure a chair?"  Their answers were, "So we know if they are the same height," and "So we can see how long the chairs are."

We went through every measuring tool and listed it as a standard unit or nonstandard unit of measurement.  Afterwards, I asked them "How can we use these things as measuring tools?"  This led into "How many chairs can fit in this room starting at the spot I've marked on the floor?  How can we figure it out?"  To dissect this problem, I asked the kids "Why do we even need to know how many chairs fit in this room?"  They responded with "So people won't have to stand up during our movie," "So we know how many rows we need," and "So we know how many people can come at one time."

We discussed how there are three parts of the chair we can measure:

How tall the chair is (the height)

How wide the chair is (the width)

How long the chair is (the length)

The students decided we didn't need to know the height, just the width and the length.

The students made a list of how we can measure:

• use cubes
• use yardsticks
• use rulers
• use the floor tiles (each floor tile is equal to 1 foot)
• make a template of the chairs on the construction paper

Next time, the students will pick how they are going to measure and get to work.  They will have several opportunities to measure.  The first time, the only parameter is their starting point  Eventually, we'll talk about aisles!

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

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

Hockey Entry #1

Hockey Entry #2

Hockey Entry #3

Hockey Entry #4

Hockey Entry #5
Hockey Entry #6

Have a great rest of your day! :-)

~Stacey~