April.17, 07: Teaching Block Day 6

Yesterday, I saw that our grasses were starting to grow, so I decided to do some measuring today. I asked the students why do they think the Eggshell People's "hair" has grown, and led them to tell me that plants need water, soil and sunshine to grow. Then I showed them how to use paperclips to measure how long their Eggshell People's hair are. Before, I have planned to use rulers to measure, but when I checked the curriculum, Grade Ones are not expected to measure in standard units. When I think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because they need to understand what measurement really means before being thrown with units that don't make sense to them. I taught them how to measure the shortest and longest piece of hair and record it in a chart. Then they wrote a journal, in the perspective of the Eggshell Person, that includes the measurements.

The measuring part was kind of difficult for them, because they had to be careful with the eggshells and they had to choose the shortest and longest (or approximately) piece of hair from the bunch of grasses. But they did it! However, some of them cracked their eggshells. Next time, I need to tell them that if it's not necessary, don't touch the eggshells.

In the afternoon, I reviewed the relationship of pennies, nickels and dimes with the class. Then we counted and skip counted together. I showed them how to play the game "Collecting Dimes", where they would replace 5 pennies with a nickel and 2 nickels with a dime. In the meantime, I picked groups to water their plants. I saw the some of them were kind of confused as to how to play the game, so I clarified it with some of the groups. At the end of the day, Ms. Carson suggested that I play it again with them tomorrow as a class, just to make sure that they understand. I believe that it is important to step back when things aren't going in the right direction. It is useless and more time consuming to push ahead when most of the students are not understanding.