I Love Math Week...and more

You may have read in The Core that this past week was Orchard School's first ever "I Love Math Week".  Many classes had guest math teachers and our class was lucky enough to host Barbara Yarrick, Math Coach from Central School. Ms. Yarrick challenged the children to fold their 8 1/2 x 11 paper into a smaller and smaller rectangles, then a square and finally a triangle. Then she taught us how to make origami cups!  Unrelated to Math we also had fun this week reading books by Tomie de Paola.  Below you can see pictures of the children working in small groups to create posters about his book, Strega Nona.  The posters will be displayed outside our room for parent conferences.

Big Snow and Big Bees!

This week was definitely dominated by the big snow and I was able to capture a few photos just minutes after the children climbed a top the giant snow bank on Thursday.  Earlier that day Ms. Courcelle, our Tech Integration Specialist introduced our class to programmable Beebots- a super fun tool that helps children learn to code.  Below you can see her explaining the basics followed by pairs coding and programming in the tech lab.  To wrap up the week the fifth graders made a big impression on us with their recitation of many of the digits in Pi. There's also a photo of an excellent explanation of Pi that happened at All School morning meeting on Friday.

 

An Eventful Three Days

This post is largely about two special events that made a big impression during our short week back from break.  On Thursday, Cardboard Teck Professors Pete Talbot and Ben T. Matchstick spent the day in Kindergarten teaching us about Force and Motion using their invention, the Pinbox 3000.  I encountered Ben and Pete at the Art Hop last summer where they were displaying their cardboard pinball machine kits and I knew they could make our science curriculum come to life.  It was awesome to have them with us and you can check out their story on their website.  Click on the link below:
www.cardboardteckinstantute.com/

 

 
Push, Pull, Gravity, Force, Inclined Plane and Friction... its all there!

 

 

On a different science note, we celebrated a Candle Day on Friday by learning about Praying Mantises with one of our own, Kindergarten naturalists.  Candle Days are a simple way for children to share things they know and care about with the rest of the group.  We get to know each other and our families just a little bit more with each one. Have a look...