Sunday, August 27, 2017

Math Teachers At Play: Blog Carnival Edition #111



Welcome to the Math Teachers at Play Blog Carnival Edition #111! I was included in the 77th edition and have wanted to contribute ever since then. So I am super excited to bring you ways to play math with children and students. You are going to want to play right away, but first, here are some fun things about the number 111 (Eleventy-One)!

We have to start with NASA, in honor of the Total Solar Eclipse we just experienced! STS-111 was a space shuttle mission to the International Space Station flown by Endeavor.

111 would be the magic constant for the smallest magic square composed only of prime numbers if 1 were counted as a prime.
A six-by-six magic square using the numbers 1 through 36 also has a magic constant of 111.
Numbers like 111 that appear the same under 180 degree rotations are called strobograms. Fun!
If you concatenated three copies of 111 and then squared the result, you get 
(111,111,111)2 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

For more information or to host the MTaP go here. You can host at your blog or submit posts!

Math Play for Littles 

I had a professional development opportunity this summer where Kent Haines was my trainer. I quickly found out we were in the same circles on Twitter. I have enjoyed reading about how he plays math with his children. He has extended that math to other children in his community through sessions at his local library. Read more about how he created his own set of polyhexes here.

http://www.kenthaines.com

Bedtime Math is a website that offers parents and kids number fun at home. It has different levels of daily fun facts and riddles. Use this website daily to spark conversations with your children from little to big!

http://bedtimemath.org/fun-math-art-on-trucks/

Making Sense of Math in the PYP is a collection of number talk transcripts between a teacher and student. After setting the stage with the script, Lee C. Dawson asks us to think about what makes sense about what the student did, what the students work tells us about their thinking, and what we would say or do next with the student.

http://pypsensemaking.blogspot.ca
Table Talk Math is a website and weekly newsletter, that comes straight to your inbox, that includes math prompts and pictures to help guide the math conversation at home. The prompts are meant to be used around the dinner table to help increase math fluency.


http://www.tabletalkmath.com/previous-newsletters/week-45-eggs

Math Play for School

Number talks are an amazing way to play math at school! Tina Cardone's post about using images and simply asking "How many?" will be something I implement in my classroom this year. The rich conversations that she showed us from doing this is important to students' number sense building. She linked to her collection of photographs as well as the collection of this number talk site.

http://drawingonmath.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-many.html?m=1

Denise Gaskins' post "What Number Am I?" could easily be adapted to a mental math number talk. I have also seen this used as a 20 questions type icebreaker with the number on a name tag on students' backs.

https://denisegaskins.com/2008/06/16/math-game-what-number-am-i/amp/
Christopher Danielson hosts Math On A Stick at the Minnesota State Fair. It is described as twelve days of mathy fun! The booth is set up for math play with different activity tables. Christopher also makes amazing tiling turtles, pentagons, and more. They are beautiful and you should go to his store and browse. You can also #tmwyk on Twitter to get ideas about how to talk to kids about math.

Math On-A-Stick
Play With Your Math is a website with a collection of attention grabbing problems to play with. Problems are adapted so everyone can play and explained with just enough words that students can discover the solution through productive struggle.

https://playwithyourmath.com/2017/07/27/3-chicken-nuggets/
Sara Van Der Werf said I needed to get a play table for my math classroom and so I did! I have only had students for a week and that included the Eclipse day so they haven't had a lot of time to play. I have already had a couple of groups stop and play though. No instructions, just tiles that they can play with however they want!

https://saravanderwerf.com/2017/05/29/you-need-a-play-table-in-your-math-classroom/
My Play Table
I hope you enjoyed this MTaP collection of MATH PLAY! If you know of other awesome links, add them in the comments!


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Thursday, August 10, 2017

Solar Eclipse First Day of School

Space.com's app Eclipse Safari Interactive Guide
My first day of school is the TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE DAY! We have the whole school geeking out over this quirk of cosmic geometry!



My first day of school plans are part of this week's Sunday Funday. Click the photo for all the details!

Although I wish we had a few days with kids before this huge event, I am super excited for an unforgettable first day of school! There are so many great activities and resources out there for the total solar eclipse but I was limited because we will only have students a couple of hours before the viewing. I suggested skipping lunch but the powers that be think they need food! Even though we are making solar ovens to cook hot dogs! We are going to start the day with an assembly to welcome them back to school and to show a quick video on what makes a total solar eclipse so amazing. Then the Solar Eclipse Fest will get started!



One of our awesome math teachers was able to sweet talk Pizza Hut into donating 400 pizza boxes for our solar ovens! Thank you Pizza Hut! A local restaurant donated a huge roll of tin foil. We will have students put these together first thing so they can be put outside to cook their hot dogs.

Other activities include a human sundial using sidewalk chalk, art with sun art paper, making bracelets out of UV beads, and constructing paper pinwheels.

We will also have solar experiments set up so they can collect temperature data. We will take data from things like a solar panel with a voltage meter, white/black paper, black and silver cans filled with  rocks, soil, water, and sand.



We will be using NASA's Globe Observer app to observe the clouds and temperature during the eclipse. This is part of NASA's citizen science project to record observations. The data collected by students will be used worldwide by scientists to study the effects of the eclipse. How cool!



NASA's website has an enormous amount of information, activities, guides, and lots more.



Make sure your glasses are NASA certified and get outside to view the Great American Total Solar Eclipse! Happy first day of school! Hope you have the best year ever!




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Saturday, August 5, 2017

Sunday Funday Goals



This post is part of a weekly blogging challenge #SundayFunday hosted by Julie. She provides the topic, you provide the fun! Please join us!

This week's topic is goals. I love the summer! Not just for the sunshine but for the time to {stay} in the rabbit hole of Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest! I can read books and peruse the internet at leisure or on the beach!



Building a community and student relationships in my classroom have always been my top priority along with engagement. The later is easier once students know they matter to you. I feel like I have student engagement down with flexible seating, interactive notebooks, crazy activities, and keeping up with all the things they are into. But with all of that, it is still about me. How I set up the lesson, activity, or notebook. How I want to assess them and what I want a finished product to look like. I knew there was more I could do to give my students a voice and I found it in this book. I want to EMPOWER my students! I want my students to be driven by a sense of purpose and meaning. To create curiosity so they want to learn.



Space Camp was an amazing experience for me this summer. Doing missions and creating a team badge were a couple of the things that got my head swirling with ideas of how I wanted this school year to look. Speakers at Space Camp said many times that the students coming into our middle school classrooms this year are the students that are going to Mars! I have always felt the enormous task of having the future in our classrooms...but they are GOING TO MARS! They will have jobs that require them to be self-directed, innovative, and creative. Even if they are not entrepreneurs, they will have to think like one. I want to EMPOWER them.



I want to empower my students to be self-starters. Last year, when I was video-ing and writing for National Board, they were vested in the whole process. They wanted to know what I wrote and were a big part of the planning. They were showing signs of being self-starters as they prepared the class to video, did the video, and wanted to reflect after. The process was for me but it empowered them. I had a true student entrepreneur who refinished and sold spool tables after being inspired by the one in our classroom. He was empowered.



I have never been scared to experiment or take creative risks. I watched my daddy do just that with each house he built. He was innovative and took creative risks like with the underground house he designed and built for us. I saw this article where the owner of Big A Fans discussed how "when you hire bright, entrepreneurial-minded employees who take initiative, and add to the equation people with the natural inclinations toward curiosity, transparency, and being contrarian, you've got the makings of a great workforce." The article's author described contrarians as "people that push against the status quo by doing, thinking, and behaving in unconventional ways, at the speed of innovation." After reading the article I labeled my daddy a contrarian and I want to be a contrarian in the classroom! I want to empower my students to be contrarians too, ready for the workforce!



So I am giving up a lot of control and giving {my} classroom to them. I want them to have real and meaningful math problems and true collaboration. I am also going to use classroom jobs. I think this will be a great way for them to start taking ownership of the class. Some of the jobs will be collaborative and some will be for managers or support personnel. One of the jobs will be a collaborative team that runs our classroom Google site. It will have information about the class, calendar, surveys, whatever else mathy-y they put on it, and a section for a family newsletter. Students will run the site and write the newsletter. I am super excited and super nervous about this! But I know that it will be awesome to empower these young people, who are going to Mars, to blaze a path of innovation and have a mindset of an entrepreneur.



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Friday, August 4, 2017

Snapchat Geofilter for the Win



Snapchat is the social media platform most of our students use often every second of the day! I try to stay current on the things they love so I can do math with what they are interested in. We were planning our last cross-curricular field trip of the year and I had the idea to make a geofilter for the students to use while we were there. It was super easy to make and the students loved using it while we were geocaching! They were super impressed with me! So if you haven't heard of geofilters, it is just a filter that is overlayed on photos that gives your location or event.









See how fun they are! I love using them everywhere we go. They also have them for special days, holidays, big events. We haven't been to a city that doesn't have several options. You can make one for your event too! Start by creating an image. You want to think about the size because you don't want it so big it covers your face!



I clearly made mine too large! I would also think about making it more transparent. Next, I used picmonkey.com to resize it and make it transparent. You can check Snapchat's website to make sure you have all of their criteria met!



After you have your photo ready, you get to draw the map boundaries of your geofilter. The geofilter will only work within that boundary and during the times you set.



My own kid thought it would be cool to do his promposal using one. I think she loved it! And so did the rest of the school! He received a lot of snapchats that day saying yes from his friends!





That's it! You submit it to be approved and earn big time cool points with your students! Seriously fun and easy!



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