Playful Learning with the B Team : 2014

Tuesday 9 December 2014

Run, run as fast as you can. You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!

We have read several versions of the Gingerbread Man and the students decided that they wanted to create their own gingerbread house. They did some brainstorming and looked on the computer at different gingerbread houses and created a list of what we needed. Here is our "New Home"!

Creating candies to hang from the ceiling!!

"I am making a pattern; blue, red, blue, red, Just like a real candy!"

After reading: The Gingerbread Man and The Gingerbread Girl, we discussed what characters are and what was their role in stories. The students were asked to name the characters in each story and we sorted them onto the charts of the story they belonged to.

The students noticed that some of the characters were the same in both books, so we decided to sort in a different way. We introduced the concept of a "Venn Diagram", where you can sort 2 things into how they are the same and how they are different (We used the characters from both stories).

SORTING UP A STORM!

To begin our introduction to the concept of sorting, I brought in my girls small socks and explained to the kids that my girls had trouble finding socks to put on before school and posed the question, "What could they do to be able to find socks to wear?" The students came up with the concept of putting the socks together that look the same, that way they could find pair of socks easily.

We placed two hula hoops on the ground and gave the students these pictures of food to sort. We explained that they could only sort these items into two groups and they needed to figure it out. After several different ideas and working through each situation, the students finally came up with the sorting rule: healthy food and junk food. We have some good debaters in the class, as we ended up having to create a group "in-between" because sometimes they can be healthy and sometimes not!

Our Sorting Song!

Can you guess our sorting rule?

At the end of our investigations, we asked the students...

"Why do we sort things?" (To see if they know why we were actually teaching them about it lol!). Here are some of our responses:

~ It's a way we can find stuff easily. - Kenzie

~ We put the toys in the toy bin. - Will

~ To find stuff. - Blake

~ To make everything cleaner. - Lyla

~ So everything is organized. - Kaleb

~ Because there's different colours of things and we can find the colours easier. - Brock

~ To organize. - Dylan

~ It's easy to find stuff then. - Tally

Monday 1 December 2014

THE FIRST SNOW!!!

In November, the kids were so excited for the first snow of the year! We talked about all the things we do in the snow and one student said, "Eat it". We talked about the reasons why it's not a good idea to eat the snow, but many students didn't believe us as they said, "It's just frozen water". While outside we collected 3 bowls of fresh, untouched snow and brought it into the classroom. After an hour, the students discovered that the snow isn't as clean as they thought it was!

Tuesday 4 November 2014

Pumpkin Discovery

To find out what our students already knew about pumpkins we asked the students the question, "What do you know about pumpkins?" These were the answers we received.

We read several books about pumpkins and brought in a pumpkin to discover how pumpkins grow. After reading the book Pumpkin Heads, the students decided to make a vote to see what kind of face we should carve on our own pumpkin.

Then we headed outside to carve our pumpkin into a scary Jack-o-Lantern. Only a few students wanted to stick their hands into the ooey, gooey, cold pumpkin.

Some of our students had the conversation that pumpkins make seeds so they can grow more pumpkins. A few students decided that they would find an empty spot in our garden to plant all the insides and seeds and "maybe" we will have pumpkins growing for us next year!

When we returned inside we talked about what other things people can do with the seeds of the pumpkins. Some students said that they cook the seeds and eat them. I had brought in my seeds from home that I had roasted and the students got to taste test them. Many students were nervous as they had not tasted pumpkin seeds before. To their surprise... many students loved them and kept asking for more!! We decided to make a chart to see who liked the pumpkin seeds and who didn't.

Then off to the pumpkin patch........

Shape Party Continued

Thank you to all our families who sent in all of our "shape" foods to share with the class. We began by sorting our foods into the different shapes to find out which food shape we had the most of. The students had to solve 2 sorting problems...2 of our foods had 2 shapes in them (circle and square). They decided to put the 2 foods in between the circle hula hoop and square hula hoop. They found that they had 0 rectangle foods, 10 circle foods, 4 square foods and 2 triangle foods and one cake that had all shapes on it.