Market Day

To better help students understand the concept of money, the 2nd grade does something every year called Market Day. Students have to either bring to school an object or food product they had made and sell it for school money (known as Eagle Bucks) or be willing to perform a service and get paid for it, such as cleaning out another's desk. A couple of things were learned in the process. A.) People will give you money if you have a quality product to sell and B.) how to make change. Addition and subtraction are just starting to sink in with the kids and some will still hand over more money than what the price has called for and walk away not even thinking about expecting to get change. Last weeks Market Day products ranged from handmade bracelets to chocolate chip cookies. I was able to make the rounds to all the classes and see how things went. Totally and absolutely students were in to this exercise. Quite a few of the students commented that " this was the best day of the year." It was like a mini-carnival atmosphere. Students were so excited about the the things to buy and food to eat. They were so innocent too in that they would just lay their money down on their desk, leave it there, and walk around to see what else was going on. With a little luck hopefully this much interest and excitement will carry over into their teenage years and give them an incentive to get summer jobs when they get older.

Using Pantomime as a Learning Tool

In Kindergarten class the other day I was given the task of teaching the children the ending sounds of words. In particular it was the –ap and –at sounds. Fortunately a lot of the words lent themselves to actions students could perform as a way to express their knowledge of exactly what the word means. In this activity I first had the children close their eyes and then I wrote up on the board a word. Their goal was to A.) not to say the word aloud [the most difficult part as it turned out] B.) try to act it out the best way they new how. C.) other students were to then guess what the word was. Words used included: hat, cat, mat, sat, rat, bat, fat, pat…. cap, lap, map, rap, sap (hard one-had to explain it), tap, wrap (I had to do this one), and nap (they loved doing this one especially when their teacher was returning back to the room). Afterwards the children had a cut, match, and paste activity consisting of the above list, where they were to match the picture to the word. Most importantly to them, they also got to color the pictures after matching and pasting was all done.

The Dancing Raisins

In Science we are teaching students the steps involved in the Scientific Method. These include: Observation, Asking a Question, Forming a Hypothesis, Conducting an Experiment, and Making a Conclusion. In the “Dancing Raisin” experiment students get to experience all of these steps in a fun way. As in any experiment students first had to identify the materials needed. They included: a cup, some raisins and clear carbonated soda. In this case it was 7 Up. With a little prompting given by the question “what would happen if raisins were dropped in a cupful of soda” students had to then make a hypothesis prior to conducting the experiment itself. Some said the soda would turn brown, others said the raisins would dissolve. Still others said the raisins would float. Upon dropping the raisins in the cup and after waiting a little while students observed that some of the raisins, after initially sinking to the bottom, rose to the top and then sank back down again. Some raisins did this several times. Students filled in this information in their logs for the conclusion part of the method. Upon completion, the lucky students got to drink the soda as well as eat the raisins. Though this conclusion following the scientific method's conclusion certainly had a pleasing affect upon the students they actually did seem to be both involved in and excited by doing the experiment itself. Watching students' reactions as the raisins rose and sunk was something to observe on my part. Their pure joy at seeing something so simple happen hopefully will lead for some of them to want to engage in further scientific experimentation, as well as to remember the goals of this particular experiment, which were the steps in the Scientific Method. I think that finding out if their hypothesis turned out to be right or not was as much a part of the excitement as was getting to drink the soda in the end.