The Great Unbreakable Frog

When I ran across my real frog specimens kit that I had purchased a year ago, put away and promptly forgot about, I knew that this was the class that it would best serve, especially since the frogs were encased in unbreakable acrylic. At first I passed around for all to see, the 4 rectangular shaped glassy like encased frogs, which are preserved at the various stages of their development. This took more time then I expected as the students were kind of awe struck and in what seemed to be great wonderment as they looked at them. All making sure they had checked out all 4 pieces at least twice. Some were even in disbelief that they were even real, beings that I told them that the frogs were dead, then "why" they asked, "was there no blood?" Thus the way the mind of an 8-year old works. As students were working on another whole group color, cut and paste longer activity about the frog, I chose 4 of them at a time to work with the acrylic frog specimens. They had to label diagrams by filling in the names of the body parts, which could be found written into the acrylic alongside the body part identifying the stages in the frog's life cycle. By having the frogs presented this way allowed for the children to compare and contrast the features of a frog at different stages of its life cycle: egg and tadpole, 2-legged frog, froglet, adult frog, and more importantly, to look in a safe up-close manner. They enjoyed it, and nothing got broken.

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.

The Mouse's Tail

Last Fall semester I was reading from a children's book of short stories which contained a play with a small group of my ESOL students. The play, "The Mouse's Tail" is a short story about how a mouse loses his tail and what he needs to do in order to get it back. The play consisted of about 5 or 6 other characters including farm animals such as a cow, a hen, a cat, and a farmer as well. At first my vision of the final outcome of the play would be along the lines of a "reader's theater" version of the play. That is, after parts were assigned we would just read it to ourselves (no memorization involved) and leave it at that. After awhile of hashing out who got which part and then running through it a couple of times (it was quite short) one of the children asked if they could make costumes for their character's part. All the others seemed quite excited by this idea too. As the children, and now cast, over the next couple of days worked on what really was just a mask, they became more excited and conscious of their role. I tried to give them some suggestions as to what type of voice to use as pertained to the character they portrayed. For example, the mouse to be a bit high pitched and squeaky, the cow a little deeper, and the cat to draw out and make his words a bit longer. Once masks were completed and with a couple more practice rehearsals the students were eager and excited to perform for the rest of the class. It was fun to observe how some of the actors would "remind" other characters to say their lines to try and sound like the animal of whose part they had. From doing this activity, with the added suggestion pretty much out of the blue to make masks is something I will always remember to include the next time around. Maybe for some of the children involved the love of the theater was created for them on that day (I doubt it), but having fun while learning were both certainly achieved, which is something I don't think any teacher could ask for more.

Adding, Subtracting & Graphing

For many many weeks my 2nd grade class has been learning how to add, subtract and make a bar graph. At first students seem to have no problem counting on their fingers, but when addens and sums become more than 10, fingers don't come in as handy any more. Over these past few months we have used cubes that can be locked together, number lines/yardsticks and 100's charts. At first all the children love to use the cubes and connect them together. After awhile it becomes cumbersome, especially with much larger numbers. Also some children tend to get confused with going from right to left and jumping down a line on the 100's Chart every 10 numbers. So far the straight number line/yardstick seems to be the best tool. Though some of my ESOL/Sped students still tend to count the number where they place their finger when starting. An issue I am grappling with. Once I nudge them along though and as long as they don't lose their place while counting along they tend to manage.

With graphing we have pulled the color cubes out again and have the children build towers for who likes what and how many like the same thing. For example, we list some toys up on the board and students raise their hand indicating which is their favorite. They then build a tower of cubes corresponding to a particular toy. We have had students write down on sticky notes numbers of teeth lost and even pockets possessed on that day's attire and then have them proceed to build their towers.

At this age manipulatives and other hand held tools, such as blocks, cubes or yardsticks really help in understanding the foundations of math. It also is a start for students to put key words/phrases such as "all the students" and "how many/much more would you need", etc. together in order to see, understand and interpret correctly the gist of a word problem.