Wow! What a busy week! I can't believe 7 weeks are gone of Term 3 and we are heading into our Spring holidays soon! This week I was chosen to attend an Australian Curriculum PD - I admit, I went into it expecting it to be quite dry, but I am very excited by the change from state by state curriculum to Australian Curriculum! We will start the transition next year! Judith - I will definitely be asking you some questions! Are there any other Australian teachers who have already started?
This week was Literacy and Numeracy Week. We celebrated a little. Each day I read the children a very special book of mine and shared why I loved it so much. Then on Thursday, we switched classes and read our absolute favourite to another group of children. A new audience!
We also wrote 6 word stories. I told the children I had a special challenge for them and they started screaming when they found out they could only write 6 words - but then when they got started, they came out with some amazing stories - my less able children loved it - it was easy for everyone!
Here are some of my favourites (the rest of the story was told through the pictures):
"Can't talk, I'm in the Olympics"
"Lawson fell from the ceiling, bang"
"Harvey and the pirates opened treasure"
I was amazed by their creativity! They had to think so much about the words they used!
But this activity was my favourite! I put together a stack of my books.
Then I asked the children what Maths we could do with the books.
The first suggestion was share them out. So we had a guess how many we would get each, then shared them around the circle.
The next suggestion was write a problem solving question.
Then we measured the spine of the book. One girl in my class decided to find the surface area!
Then we measured a stack of books.
Then we searched for words with the most number of letters.
The children had lots more ideas: adding together the number of pages in each of their books, finding out the surface area using tiles, finding how many of one word is on one page, making a tally of how many two and three letter words there are on the page. We could have gone on for ever!
If you wanted to do this activity in your classroom too, you might like to use this worksheet I created (just for you all, we approached the task with a more problem solving/investigative approach). In the pack is a version with Australian spelling and one with US spelling - check before printing!
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This week was Literacy and Numeracy Week. We celebrated a little. Each day I read the children a very special book of mine and shared why I loved it so much. Then on Thursday, we switched classes and read our absolute favourite to another group of children. A new audience!
We also wrote 6 word stories. I told the children I had a special challenge for them and they started screaming when they found out they could only write 6 words - but then when they got started, they came out with some amazing stories - my less able children loved it - it was easy for everyone!
Here are some of my favourites (the rest of the story was told through the pictures):
"Can't talk, I'm in the Olympics"
"Lawson fell from the ceiling, bang"
"Harvey and the pirates opened treasure"
I was amazed by their creativity! They had to think so much about the words they used!
But this activity was my favourite! I put together a stack of my books.
The first suggestion was share them out. So we had a guess how many we would get each, then shared them around the circle.
The children had lots more ideas: adding together the number of pages in each of their books, finding out the surface area using tiles, finding how many of one word is on one page, making a tally of how many two and three letter words there are on the page. We could have gone on for ever!
If you wanted to do this activity in your classroom too, you might like to use this worksheet I created (just for you all, we approached the task with a more problem solving/investigative approach). In the pack is a version with Australian spelling and one with US spelling - check before printing!
