Mental Math

Joud and Wallah turned 7 years old today!  Happy birthday, Joud and Wallah! 

At the beginning of every math class we complete a small section called "Mental Math and Reflexes."  During this time we think about numbers and their relationships in our heads before we try to solve the problem.  This is an excellent skill for you to practice with your first grader at home while you're cooking dinner or in the car together.  We try to make the problems ones they have to really think about and decipher the important information from the less important information.  For example, some questions you might ask are:

"Dad bought 13 red apples on Sunday.  On Friday, he only had 3 left.  How many apples did dad eat during the week?"

or "Abby and Andrew went to the zoo.  They saw 2 turtles, 6 monkeys and 3 lions.  How many mammals did they see?" 

and lastly, "We made two pizzas for lunch.  One pizza had 7 slices of pepperoni.  The other pizza had 11 slices of pepperoni.  How many more slices of pepperoni did the second pizza have?"

I've found that the first graders like it best when I make the stories about them and the things they find interesting. :)

Today in math we had an exploration day where we used our math materials in new ways.  We used the geo boards to build shapes with specific edge lengths.  We built structures with base 10 blocks and had to record the number of flats, longs and cubes we used.  We also used a tape measure to record our heights on a classroom graph.   Who knew measuring heights could be so much fun- it was their favorite part of the entire hour!

In reading and SWR we continued to work with adding the letter "s" to the end of words to show more than one.  We also worked hard to read with expression and change our voices slightly for different characters.  I love listening to the students read with expression, they are becoming so good at it!  It was especially fun that one of the characters in our story was a Grandma.  Their idea of how a Grandma should sound varies completely and is pretty comical.  

Our science word of the day was condensation. Condensation is when water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into a liquid, forming clouds.

We pretended that we were a tiny drop of water in an ocean, lake or stream.  The sun came out and started to turn us to vapor and bring us up to the sky.  Then, we got very cold and condensed together to form a cloud. 

Look at these first graders pretending to be water:

       Here we are, just waiting for the sun....

We are evaporating from the sun and turning into vapor

We are getting colder, turing back into water, and forming into a cloud!