First Grade Excitement

We have had an exciting couple of days in 1st grade! On Thursday we  got a betta fish for our class.  We reviewed the needs of living things and how we would provide for those needs as we got his aquarium set up.  We did a bit of research to learn more about betta fish.  Many names were suggested, and after a vote the winning name was Penny.  Penny is currently enjoying his new home in our class.  He will be one of our references as we learn more about living things in science.

Friday morning in math students enjoyed a math treasure hunt.  They used their iPads to scan QR codes, solved math problems, and found that answer to scan the next QR code.  When they had solved all their math problems, the last QR code led to a fun music video as a reward.  In our next math units we will be learning about geometry and fractions!  More math fun lies ahead.

Then Friday afternoon during our Create Time, we went to the media lab for our first robotics lesson.  Students worked in pairs to follow the directions on the laptops and build a Lego lion.  Then they practiced some coding skills to program it to stand up and lie down.  This was a very popular activity and we will definitely go back for more robotics!  Here is a short video of how it moved and some more photos of hard working engineers:

Math Activity Today

Since we are working on addition and subtraction these days we tried a new activity in class today to practice adding 2 or more addends.  I gave each student 2 playing cards (from 2 - 10, no face cards) and they could use one or both of their cards.  Then I called out a target number to make and the kids found partners whose cards added up to that target number.  Students used strategies like the combinations that make 10 or using the spots on the cards to count on.  Here are some of the successful combinations that were made today!

For the final challenge I asked students to make exactly 20 using exactly 4 cards.  That was tricky, but we had 2 groups find a solution!