Store "Grand Opening" and Math Magic

Great times today.  We had two of our second grade classrooms come and visit us to see our stores we'd created for our town.  These other two rooms hadn't started their shops yet, so we got to show ours to help them generate ideas.  When the kids came in, I introduced our town's District Reps and Mayor- all who gave queen waves, kingly salutes, or double Nixon peace signs.  I loved at the end when the classes were leaving, my District Three Rep, Amaya, called out- "Thank you so much for visiting our town, we hoped you enjoyed the tour!"  I had not told her to say any such thing, so it was a real thrill to see how much they took on the role.  Our Mayor shook a few hands as well.   With the shops completed, and our tour a success, we hung them on the back bulletin board grouped by business type.  They are already looking forward to taking them home.  I'm going to go ahead and have them create products and have a market day- but I'll do an abbreviated version.  I have to- I'm pretty much out of time.


Another day of successful small group math pulls.  I met with four kids at a time today to go over the correct use of a balance scale.  We talked about units of measure- grams and ounces, and how a gram is about a paper clip, and that 28 paperclips make up an ounce.  I have two sizes of paperclips, so we took 28 small ones and then investigated how many big paperclips that equaled.  Turned out to be about ten.  one group did come up with nine, and another group 11, but six other groups got ten exactly, so we just went for the average.  We linked the large paperclips together into a chain to make an "ounce weight".  Then we selected an item from our summer goodies basket and investigated how many grams it equaled, and then used that knowledge to estimate how many ounces that would be.  The kids were really good at it, and since I really only had time to let them measure one item- they are looking forward to having the balances available as a center tomorrow to weight the other items.

I picked up my items at the Dollar Store, in the beachy luau section.  We're weighing plastic lei beads, fake flower leis, a hula dancer dashboard girl, different tropical plastic clappers, sunglasses, flamingos, and the like.  I also have other small items that they can use if they want to continue to practice weighing things.

We also spent time measuring flip flops.  I ended up not hiding them around the room, but instead putting them into basket, telling them to select a flip flop, trace it on paper, and then measure the flop at four different points (toe to heel, widest part of foot, narrowest part of foot, and then the height of the flop from the floor- some of those foam ones are pretttttty thick).  They recorded their measurements on the paper and then they could color the flip flop drawing before selecting another flop.  I hadn't thought about it ahead of time, but the first young lady that finished stapled hers into a book- and then the rest of them did that too. So next year, I'm going to have that PLANNED.  I did not have a single student try to get out of the activity.  Even the boys sat there calmly selecting flops and tracing them and doing the measurements.  Surprising- but appreciated.

I picked up a bunch of weird sunglasses at the Dollar Store tonight, so I'll have them do sunglasses measurements as well as the balance scale project.  That's two things to keep them busy while I pull groups to go over liquid volume and do the first half of our popsicle experiment.  and then I just have to teach them the thermometer, and have a Water Blitz day.  I don't think the Measuring Me book is going to happen, but don't count me out yet!