Maths Stuff

Here are the vases of hyacinths we made for Flower Day, I told you they were mathematical!

I found this idea on pinterest, and I liked it! So I made these (it's just a pill box from the $2 shop) and the children have had heaps of fun with them. Just reading numbers up to a million is a challenge for some, while others have created games to play with the numbers. Some of my higher level thinkers have come up with some pretty good games too!

A rush to complete our kinetic art sculptures, most of them are finished and most of them do work, aside from the few who got carried away with the hot glue gun and stuck the wire to the post in the centre instead of only gluing the beads. These could so be mathematical!

Speech to Text and Fractions

Just a very quick update, and I am not sure how well this will work out, but after numerous attempts with various speech to text apps for William, I stumbled upon a free app for the ipad called Dragon Dictation. It actually seems really very good, and picks up speech relatively well compared to the ones I have tried so far. William does tend to make a little hum sound at the end of everything that he says, and speaks very quickly, so I need to find a way to discourage this without hurting his feelings, when he uses speech to text.
If successful, I shall make a copy of his next piece of "writing" and post it on the blog, and I really hope it works! I know that the rest of the class will love using it :)

The other app I found is Virtual Manipulatives, and I love it! It allows the children to move parts of a whole (fractions of circles or bars) in order to compare, add together, or put into size order. It's super easy to use and includes fractions, decimals and percentages. And you can switch between them. It is a very useful app, especially for people who like visual representations for things - like me!

Circle Blipp

We finished the Circle Blipp - almost - I did want to add the children using compasses because I thought that would be pretty cool, but we have run out of time. To check out what we have done, you'll need to get the Blippar app, enter the code 29581, and hover your device over the above image.
Next week is extremely busy, we have heaps happening and I am stressing a little bit but I will just have to take my own advice, and take things one at a time, because if I think about everything all at once I'll go mad. Which maybe I already am!
And we have observations on Tuesday (which I really don't enjoy - at all!) and then our class Festival of Learning in the afternoon. Wednesday is flower day and our class "spring craft" was very mathematical! I shall post photos after flower/ag day is over. Then end of term stuff... and I will have to start thinking about reports!
I took a small group of 6 children last Thursday to teach them how to use Hyperstudio, this was awesome, the children were fully into it and engaged for the whole day.
Also, e-ako maths is proving to be a hit with my students. they love it, especially William, so my doubts about it were unnecessary.
Following our Digital Tech meeting last Tuesday, I signed up for Quizizz, and I have had a bit of a play with it. I think I shall get creative during the holidays and make some quizzes. I haven't time right now to do anything properly, so it will have to wait. I think maybe a fractions quiz would be fun. The worst thing is trying to find lovely images that are labeled for reuse - I might have to get the camera out and take my own photos. Or maybe I could draw pictures.
Right now I need to focus on Monday - finish sculptures, complete persuasive writing, prepare for FoL...

Figure it Out

I attended another maths PD on Thursday, and while there we were given a task from a Figure it Out book, and I suddenly thought to myself, I've not even used one of those books this year! How bad is that? I used to always use Figure it Out, and I always had a bunch of different books at different levels on the classroom maths shelf for the children to use independently as well... how did I forget to use them? Maybe because there is so much online stuff, and you can instantly find and access resources and problems, and make stuff up that suits what you're doing in maths, that you forget about the resources you already have in the school.
Naughty me.
I will be gathering a little supply on Monday, for sure!
Another thing that I took away from this maths session was e-ako maths, which I think might be a worthwhile thing. I've not checked it all out properly yet, but I did create a class and I have registered my students. They now have their own usernames and passwords, so on Monday we shall try it out. I hope it is useful. I feel as though I have a zillion different usernames and passwords myself, and I struggle to remember who I am sometimes! Not really :) But the children already have Sumdog accounts, and KiVa usernames and passwords, and I am forever having to locate lost passwords for them, even though they've been told to glue this info into their notebooks. Oh well.
From what I saw of e-ako maths (yes I did log on as a student - with her permission of course) it looks relevant and is something that they can do independently. I like how you can have the speaker on and listen to the question as well. Makes it easier for children who are struggling with reading. But from what I saw, and this is only a little teeny tiny bit, it doesn't look super exciting. That sounds awful, I know, but if I were a child I would want it to be more exciting to look at. Maybe that's just me. I guess I shall wait and see what the children think of it.
And before I go... we have been working on our "Circle" Blipp. Jorgiah used Hyperstudio for the first time and loved it. Her job was to create a clip that showed the parts of a circle. It's only short but I'm putting it on here anyway, because I reckon she did really well.

                                   



And I still wonder why the word segment is often used when referring to a sector. Cheese sector! Sounds funny though. Even on a scratch ticket (and I rarely buy them, I just happened to get one recently) it had a wheel, and the instructions said you had to match numbers on the wheel "segments" which were actually sectors.