We've been studying measurement in our GoMath chapter this week. As a way to ignite the students' prior knowledge, we went out into the garden and found items that were long(er) and short(er). This was really fun for them and it was an easy way to integrate the garden into the math lesson. Here's a photo of an example a student had for two things that could be classified as "longer" and "shorter." Notice how the other student is documenting it using the iPad! We've got that down pat now!
As I said, we've started focusing on measuring using nonstandard units of measurement. This is a really fun topic to study with the kiddos; the students are more mature at this time of the school year and they're able to do things they haven't been capable of doing thus far in first grade, like work effectively with a partner to reach an objective. As a formative assessment, I paired them up and had them measure various items around the classroom using nonstandard units of measurement instead of sitting at their desks and working in their GoMath workbooks. They absolutely loved it and were really successful at it! Here's a few pictures of our experience:
As you can see, this was a really fun, real-world activity for the students. It kept them engaged and practicing the objective and skill.
Since we spent last week cleaning out the flowering and unusable plants from our garden beds, we had a blank slate to work with this week. I posed a driving question to the students - how should we plant our seeds in the gardens? I had an open-ended discussion with them and encouraged them to share their ideas about how everyone would be able to plant something. Since my center groups are leveled, I had to do more scaffolding with some groups than others, but they all eventually arrived at the same conclusion: we needed to divide up the gardens in some way so that everyone got a little piece of it. My higher groups were able to see that there were already square feet of space sectioned off inside the garden beds and that's what we should use to divide up the gardens. The lower groups were able to arrive at that conclusion with a bit more scaffolding. Here's a few photos of us out in the garden talking about it:
The next problem was figuring out how many square beds were available to use, since as you can see some of them still housed successful plants we decided to leave. This was an excellent moment for the students to apply their skills of addition and subtraction in a real-world situation! I differentiated the math for each of my groups: my higher groups counted each square in a garden bed, subtracted the number of squares that weren't available, and then added the differences of each raised bed together (adding three numbers, anyone?! Hello 1.OA.A.2!) to figure out that we had a total of 32 open squares amongst the three raised beds. My lower groups counted the number of available squares and then added the three numbers together. When we all reached our totals, I then posed the following question to my higher groups - if we have 32 available squares and 25 students in the class, do we have enough squares for everyone in the class to have one they can plant? I can't tell you how proud I was of them when they eagerly told me YES! and were able to explain why! I could see their little minds working away and I was so excited that we were able to use their new math skills in such a meaningful way. Here's a few more photos (shot by a student!) from our fun day:
