Collaborative Cooking Project to Teach Doubling & Halving

Last week all of the students from Year 1 (Kindergarten) through Year 6 (5th grade) worked on doubling and halving in math.  The Year 1 and Year 2 students worked on doubling and halving the numbers from 1 – 10.  The Year 3 – Year 5 students worked on doubling and halving larger numbers (2 – 4 digit numbers).  Year 6 worked on doubling and halving decimals and fractions.  On Friday, we combined all three classes and spent two hours cooking doubled recipes.  The students worked in multiage groups of 4 or 5 students.

 

First, the kids had to take there recipes and find the amounts needed for half a recipe and for double a recipe.  Each group had a different recipe.  Our recipes included – Orange Smoothie, Homemade Playdough, Ice Cream in a Bag, Chocolate Peanut Butter Bark, Jell-O and Vanilla Cakes.  Feel free to download our recipes sheets from Google Docs.

    

     

Then, the students had to go through the steps of creating their recipes.  Although we had three teachers around to help, most of the groups were able to follow the recipes autonomously, generally led by their Year 6 students.

                            

               

Each of the recipes finished at different times, so those students who finished early – or who had a long amount of time waiting during a step in their recipe – received a piece of paper and some crayons to reflect on the cooking experience.

          

Once all of the recipes were complete – each group served their finished product to the other friends.  The students were also responsible for cleaning up the materials and workspace where they cooked.  Since many of our students come from homes with household help, this is an important skill for our students to practice.

   

The entire experience was a wonderful time for our students to work on cooperative learning skills, leadership skills, self – help skills, math skills, reading and writing skills.

How do you use cooking in your classroom?

Starting with a Question – Math Inquiry

I have just finished my first PYP (Primary Years Program) class.  If you are unfamiliar with PYP, it is the precursor program to the IB (International Baccalaureate) high school diploma.  It is geared for Pre K – 5th grade (Nursery – Year 6) and is based in inquiry learning.  Most of student learning – especially within Science and Social Studies – in a PYP classroom should stem from questions that students have.
When you think of this age level, having student questions lead learning makes complete sense.  It is the reason that “Unschooling” is so popular with homeschooling in the US.  Kids have questions, lots of them.  On their quests to find the answers to these questions, they learn more than they ever could by us modeling and talking to them.  Also, if the topic interests them, students are more likely to remember what they have learned.
As much as I like and believe in this system of unschooling and inquiry learning, I teach in the real world where there are certain things that have to be taught, no matter if we like them or not, no matter if we have questions about them or not.   So, as I was finishing up my PYP class, I started brainstorming how I could mix what I HAVE to teach and how I WANT to teach.
This is how I decided to do “Monday Math Inquiries”.  While this name sounds fancy, this really just means that on Monday we start out with a question or a real life use for whatever we are learning about that week in math.  For example, this week we learned about doubling and halving.  So my students started on Monday with these questions:
Year 3 (2nd grade): We have 2 baskets. If we put 46 apples in each basket, how many apples do we have all together? If we split 46 apples between the two baskets, how many apples go into each basket?
Year 4 (3rd grade):  We have 2 baskets. If we put 246 apples in each basket, how many apples do we have all together? If we split 246 apples between the two baskets, how many apples go into each basket?
Year 5 (4th grade):  A new video games costs £22.50. The video game is on sale for half off, how much will it cost? How much will two video games cost?
Year 6 (5th grade):  A new video games costs £32.34. The video game is on sale for half off, how much will it cost? How much will two video games cost?

I plug these questions into my Differentiated Problem Solving Sheet and students spend the first 30 minutes trying to solve the problem.  After students have made a good attempt at working with the new concept, we added our Reference Sheet to our Interactive Math Notebooks and model how to double and half numbers.  Then, for homework students watch videos of tutorials on doubling and halving that I have linked to for them.  (For more on the videos I use – check out this post on my Math Video Collaborative Google Doc.)
By allowing students time to “inquire” before I teach, I have found that students are making more connections with what I teach and remembering the concept better.  I’m sure this is not true inquiry, but it does make a difference in my classroom, and at the end of the day that’s all that matters!
How do you use inquiry in math?

ISM Spotlight – All About Casablanca in Three Languages

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

Tonight I want to show you a collaborative project that was worked on in 3 languages.  Our Year 1/ Year 2 (Kindergarten & 1st grade) teacher Courtney Nassar did a unit on “Our City – Casablanca”.  Ms. Nassar guided the students through an inquiry discovery unit on the people and places that make up a city, including creating these collage letters, graphing the languages spoken, charting the things you can see, hear and feel in the city and going on a field trip to a variety of places around the city including the post office, the bakery and the bank.

 

Her students were lucky enough to work on the concepts of who and what made up their city in English, French and Arabic.  Mr. Raki, our Arabic teacher, worked on the letters that are used to spell out Casablanca in Arabic.  In Arabic, we say “Dar Beida”, which literally translates into white house – just like Casablanca does. 

 In French, Madame Gaelle worked with the kids to create a poster of French words about Casablanca that go all the way from A – Z.  The students not only brainstormed the words, they also colored the letters and wrote the words to create the poster.

 

 

 

 

 

Stop by next week to find out what’s going on at ISM.

Holidays Around the World Website

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

It’s that time of the year when people start to think about the Winter Holidays.  If you’re looking to teach your kids about holidays celebrated around the world than the BBC has a great section of their website that is just for you. 

In the World Religions section of the BBC website, there is information about each of the six main religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism.  In addition to general information, there are lessons and worksheets for teachers to use and there are links to even more specific information about holidays and festivals of each religion.  For each holiday, there are activities and worksheets as well.  Here is an example of a worksheet you can find for Ramadan. 

This website is a great addition to a unit on world holidays.  If you’re looking for more holiday resources, you can find a ready made Power Point, reader’s theater and vocabulary packet about how light is used in holidays around the world at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

       

Teaching about holidays in other cultures is a good way to introduce students to the concept of global thinking and understanding that not everyone in the world is the same.  How do you introduce this concept to your students?

ESL Needs Don’t Stop After the First Year

As a teacher at an International School, many of my students are English Language Learners. Even my native English speakers are living in a non-English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here is this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

ELL Teaching Tip of the Week: Second and third year ESL students still need extra assistance.

 The first year of English for any student is the most difficult, but it’s not the only time when English Language Learners need help.  Recently, I had a parent conference with the parent of a second year ESL student.  Her words to me have stuck in my head.  She said, “Last year, I knew what our goal was.  She needed to speak, read and write English.  But this year, I don’t know what the goal is.  What do we do now?”  Here is what I said to her, and what I would recommend other teachers continue to work on with second and third year ESL students:

1.  Vocabulary Development:  During the first year, an ESL student seem to grasp words quicker than any other time in their development, simply because they start off with zero and they need a word for everything!  However, the second year their vocabulary should double what it was in the first year because now they can begin to connect words with other words they know and have multiple words for one thing.  This is the time to focus in on synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and homographs.  Structured vocabulary instruction should continue during this time.  My second and third year ESL students continue to use my ESL Vocabulary Packets to enrich their vocabulary, now working at a Level 3 or Level 4.  With second year students, they may know all of their body parts, but do they know words like eyebrow, eyelid, finger nail and freckle?  Most likely not, so this is the time to add these detailed words to their vocabulary.

2.  Speaking and Writing Grammatically Correct:  During the first year, we just want ESL students to speak.  We are often struggling through that dreaded silent period and once they start to produce sentences – in speaking and writing, we are willing to take anything we can get, no matter the grammar.  However, during the second year, students should be able to produce a lot – both orally and written – so now is the time to get that grammar under control.  I teach grammar rules explicitly using mini lessons and daily language.  Never assume the proper grammar will just “sound right” to your students.  They need to know why they must speak and write with this grammatical structure. I  require all of my students to speak, as well as write, grammatically correct.  They need to practice this skill in all productive language.  If they say something incorrectly during their second or third year of English, I correct them gently and ask them to restate the sentence.  After awhile, they begin to correct each other – and I allow this as long as it is done respectfully and politely.  Soon, the grammar is no longer a problem. In fact, many of my ESL students end up with better grammar than my native speakers!

3.  Listening Carefully:  When you first learn a language, you can only focus into a story read aloud or a t.v. show in that language for a very small time.  During that first year, I don’t ask comprehension questions of my students during read aloud or videos.  I do make them sit respectfully and be immersed, but I know that they are only comprehending about 25% of what is said.  By the second year, students should be up to 60 – 75% comprehension.  Now is the time to focus their listening.  During the second year, I regularly ask comprehension questions, require reflection and use other strategies that require students to actively listen to what is going on.  This is the best time for students to begin working in a Read Aloud Journal.  After not understanding for so long, it is a shock to students when they realize that they can grasp the meaning of what is going on, and often they don’t realize it unless I point it out and require it.

4.  Reading Voraciously:  Just like with listening, students in their first year often read long passages, or pages of a book without having any clue what they read.  This is especially true for older students who come to English already reading in a home language that has a similar alphabet/ phonetic structure to English (Spanish, French, etc.)  (Students coming from Arabic or Chinese do less of this, as they have to re-learn phonics when they come to English.)  During the second year, students have built up enough vocabulary to begin to truly understand what they are reading, so this is the time to let them loose on reading anything and everything.  Pick a topic or a series that interests them and encourage them to read as much as possible.  Encourage students to re-read stories from their first year of English and see how much more they understand now.

5.  Maintain the Home Language:  During the first year of English learning, it is really easy to let the home language slip into the background, as all energy is focused on learning English.  (As a mother, I did this when my kids began learning Arabic.  We stopped all but the basics in English to allow their brain to focus on the new language.)  However, we don’t want students to lose their home language for so many reasons.  There are reasons like family continuity, the benefits of being bilingual, future studies in their home language etc.  However, there are also benefits to English learning if a home language is maintained.  For example, students will be able to compare and contrast the grammatical structures of the two languages, will be able to find cognates between the two languages and will be able to connect the common stories of the two languages.  So, during the second and third year, I encourage my parents to work with their children in their home language – continuing growth in reading, writing, grammar, spelling, vocabulary etc.

 

I am very lucky to get to work with my students for more than one year, so I generally know where they are in the ESL spectrum when I get them.  If you don’t, be sure to ask students, or past teachers, at the beginning of the year how long they have been learning English.  On year, I had a student who spoke beautiful English, but wrote terribly.  It wasn’t until October that someone told me this was only his second year of English.  Knowing our students helps us better meet their needs.

What do you do with your second and third year ESL students?

Do you enjoy the weekly TESOL Teaching Tips? Would you like to view an hour long presentation on this topic? I recently presented on Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners at the Everything’s Intermediate Expo. Now you can grab the presentation for just $3.95 from Teacher’s Notebook.


Find more TESOL Teaching Tips here, and come back every Tuesday for a new tip!

Maintaining Fast Facts

Every teacher I have ever worked with from 2nd grade through 6th grade has said to me at some point - “Math is so much easier when they know their facts”.  I spend a lot of time making sure my students understand what 2 + 4 and 2 x 4 mean, but when we get into long division, doubling, fractions, and measurement, students really just need to have these basic facts memorized.  So, how do I teach fast facts?  Well, we do a variety of games and tiling puzzles, but mainly I ask the kids to practice each night using: apps like Flash to Pass, websites like Mathmagician, or plain old flash cards.  Then, we take 1 minute fact quizzes every single day.  I have 8 levels of quizzes, (click on any level to download from my TPT store).

Addition

Subtraction

Addition & Subtraction

Multiplication

Division

Multiplication & Division

Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication & Division

Order of Operation ( Including parenthesis and exponents)

I have all of these levels because I teach 4 grade levels of math.  However, when I taught just 3rd grade and just 1st grade, I generally had 3 or 4 different levels in my classroom.  Each student starts at a base for their grade level (addition for 2nd and 3rd grade, multiplication for 4th and 5th grade) and works their way up until they run out of levels.  As students master quizzes, they color in various shapes and hang it on our door, building a class pictogram.

Since I have my students for more than one year, the ones that stay with me pick up at the beginning of one year wherever they left off the previous year. 

I have two 5th grade students right now who are working on order of operation quizzes, which means they have really mastered their facts and are now taking it a step further.  These two students have a much easier time with other pieces of math than the students who are still working on multiplication facts, because they don’t have to stop in the middle of a long division problem, or a reducing fractions problem and figure out the multiplication or division piece. 

How do you work on math facts?  Do you think they are an important piece of the puzzle when students are learning math?