The Iron Giant

Off the cuff days are the best!

Today we had an 'Iron Giant' day. We read the novel (It is very short) and focussed on making predictions based on the information given and our own experience, analysing our predictions and altering them. We did this in a literacy circle at the end of each chapter (5 chapters total). While reading the student's were drawing what they visualised the Iron Giant to look like.

After we finished the book we got out a huge box of Lego. Each student created their own Iron Giant. We are going to use these to measure the perimeter and determine the area of. For my top maths group they will be determining the volume required to box their Iron Giant and creating a prototype of this. 

As the students were building their Iron Giants we put the movie on. We paused it every 5 minutes and added to our class compare and contrast map of the differences and similarities between the book and movie. Boy oh boy their were so many differences that I was surprised to say P3 were extremely disappointed in the movie and were asking if they could film their own alternate endings. 

We ended the day by doing a little drama and hot seating how the characters were feeling in certain situations. It was an awesome day! 

Skittle Maths

There is no cooler way to engage kids into maths than with candy!

This skittle maths resource was a great start of year resource to evaluate my class's understanding of many maths concepts (Place value, understanding word problems, operations skills, decimals, percentages, collecting data, co-ordinate planes, fractions and graphing).

The resource is designed for numerous lessons. I bought 5 bags of skittles which was way too many! I ended up using 2 bags for 28 students. I had them work in pairs giving each pair 25 skittles. They began by recording down the colour and number of skittles they had at the top of the first page so that they had the data to work with in future lessons. After recording our data sample down we began with place value followed by operations skills and for my top group they created a pie graph of their skittle colours (next lesson they will be working the percentage of colours in their data sample). It was easy to scaffold and the students were happy to work independently to achieve their results. Of course the best part of the lesson was when they were allowed to eat their skittles!

The resource is now being used in our guided maths rotation 1-2 sheets a week. 

Click for resource