Did you know your students put on the hard hats of construction workers this week?
Throughout our first math unit, the first grade has been solidifying routines, revisiting place value, describing teens numbers, exploring the hundreds chart, finding a variety of ways to represent a value (through concrete manipulatives as well as pictorial methods), and has spent quite a bit of time on the concept of tally marks. As we engage in "number talks" to strengthen our number sense, tally marks remind us that numbers are simply the written representation of a certain value. We can also represent values with tally marks! We use tally marks to make groups of five which help us count more efficiently, and are also a speedy way to record data! Our extension of tally marks came to fruition in the form of our first performance task! Performance tasks, though a form of assessment, are quite different from a traditional test. Performance tasks are all about real-life application of math skills in a way that challenges student learning through questioning and problem solving and can reach all learners by having a manipulative and pictorial component. There is more freedom in how you demonstrate what you know. Our first grader's challenge was to solve a problem for the Bobcat family who had recently moved to Bow. The Bobcat's have three small children and a puppy, and though they are very happy with their new home, they don't have a fence! In order to make their home safer for their children and dog, the Bobcats needed your student to build a fence for them. It just so happened that the Bobcats had a particular design in mind that looked just like a bundle of five tally marks! Students needed to choose the spacing between their fence posts (to keep the kids and dog safe) but had autonomy in how the fence (made out of popsicle sticks) reached from one end of the yard to the other. This was demonstrated on a place-mat sized piece of paper. There were also accompanying questions that asked the students to count not only how many fence posts were used in all, but how many bundles of five were used. This was a highly engaging activity that allowed students to build, color, count, problem solve, and write and the end products are something to be proud of! We can't wait to display them! Please enjoy some photos of our building process below! Until next week!
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AuthorMusings of a Grade 1 teacher. Outlet for exciting "goings-on" in the classroom. Archives
May 2018
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