Harris Hillman Visit is Highlight of the Week

It has been a wonderful week. I can't put into words how amazing the experience was that your children and I shared this past Tuesday afternoon. While seeing all of the children with their various disabilities was eye-opening, the empathy and compassion shown by the students was a beautiful thing to see. The performances the kids put together were awesome and please take a moment to check them out on the posts below this one. You may also check out Mrs. Earhart's performances on her blog. Here are the rest of the highlights for this week:

MATH:
We did a bit of review this week. We also added a new dimension to our daily Math Races. For those of you that don't know, Math Races is a daily activity that has turned out to be a excellent extension of our math curriculum. The way it works is that the students are asked to come up with a phrase, equation, or other representation where the value is equal to the date (i.e. all of today's values were 16). They then have 5 minutes to, taking turns, write as many of those expressions on the board as they can. The kids have gone from just using basic addition and subtraction problems, to using multiplication, variables, square roots, parentheses, exponents, division, and more. This week we added a data analysis to Math Races. Once the time limit is up, I go over the problems and discuss the more difficult ones. Then I count how many each side got correct. Finally, we add the items to a data set. The students then find the mean, median, mode, and range of that data set. The kids enjoy the competition aspect as well as investigating the data sets. It is a good time.

SCIENCE
We wrapped up our terrarium study this week. The kids had a blast pouring out the terrariums in to foil pans and were pleasantly surprised when they discovered many of their critters were still alive. In fact, some of the isopods (pill bugs) had multiplied since the beginning of the project. Many fine crickets and a few pill bugs were lost during this project, but I am sure they lived a long and full life up to this point, or at least that is my hope :) Both classes had all of their materials ready to begin their second inquiry project of the year. Unfortunately, yours truly, had the students use too much water on the first day and as a result, the experiments were invalid. However, I am going to gather up some potting soil and cups this weekend and when the students return next Wednesday, we will be ready to restart the experiments in hopes of a more successful outcome.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful Fall Break. Take care!