Episode One: 'The Block P3'

'The Block P3' has kicked off this term!

Say goodbye to what was once a boring measurement unit and hook students in with Minecraft, movie making and tons of creativity. 

The challenge was set, students at to form teams to compete in 'The Block P3'

Criteria:

Teams of 2-4
Pick a team name
Pick a team colour
Choose a team motto
Design a team poster
Film a small segment for the trailer to 'The Block P3'

Once students had completed the assigned tasks they began to design their own visions.
I set no criteria at this stage. We simply brainstormed what was necessary in a house and what was extra. I made it very clear to students that the more they added to their houses the harder the maths would be (some did not listen to this instruction and have made it rather challenging for themselves). I told students that the only math requirement for this section was that they had to have the perimeter written down for each room.

As they bought their maps to me to check I sent them off to check if their rooms were to scale. One student came to me with a child's room that was 4m long and 3m wide. I told that student to get rulers and map it on the classroom floor. She quickly realized this was much to small, this sparked a great class discussion about scale and students began wandering outside to pace out the size of garages, swimming pools and all the important man cave.

Once students finished their own maps complete with perimeters and to scale they sat down with their teams. They shared their maps and discussed the pros and cons of each persons design. They had an A3 piece of paper and began mapping out their team design. As they did this I asked to begin thinking about the criteria that we would need to judge these (we will be co-constructing the judging criteria next week).

They are aware that although they are designing their vision they know there will be alterations made based on the challenge that is given to them each week.

They will get their first challenge next week and will have to create a video of their room to add to their blogs as their episode. The winning room each week will feature on this blog and be shown to the other class that is competing as well.

How to differentiate this unit:

Give different groups different challenges based on their ability.
One group may have to design a lounge with a perimeter of 25m but it can't be a perfect square.
The next group might be working with the area of 15m squared.
It is up to you how hard or easy you make this unit for your students.


Next steps

- Students to design and build their first room based on the challenge criteria
- Students finish to filming their trailers
- Co construct the judging criteria

Also check out Mrs Hay's class and their Block adventure:

'The Block P2'

Geometry Towns Assessment

I am always looking for new and fun ways to assess my students understanding.
They hate tests and I don't enjoy marking them, however they love using ICT and art.
This was a brilliant way to assess their understanding of geometry at the end of our unit.

I stumbled across the resource on TPT (My holy bible of resources)

Students had spent the term learning geometry vocabulary and concepts.
They were given the initial planning sheet and used their books/knowledge/computers to compile a glossary of terms with examples.

Students then completed a draft copy of their final map, the used this copy to communicate with me each feature of the map and how they had meet the criteria for the task.

Student's then began a final copy. Once completed the students glued the criteria and the first draft onto the back of their posters before laminating.

Student's then each took turns at presenting back to the class one aspect from their poster.

I would recommend this resource to all teachers who want to spice up their assessment process!


Pros:

- The vocabulary language used in discussion during the task was outstanding
- The student's didn't realize they were doing an assessment
- They had fun, it was hands on and suited to all learning styles
- They look fantastic on the wall and the back of each poster has all the learning
- Student's were all proud of their final product

Cons:

- This took way longer than I had originally planned, I had to hold a few catch up sessions
- Some students hadn't realized that you could integrate various features and their maps become quite hard to decipher

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

Look how much fun we are having!

We have been having lots of fun in P3 this week!

Science:

We looked at chemical reactions to begin our science unit.

We mixed Redbull and milk together and made predictions (hypothesis) on what would happen. 

After recording the results we came up with an I wonder question... 

Mrs Hay came in to view our experiments and posed the question 'Would the same reaction occur if you altered the colour?' which sent everyone into a flurry of I wonder...

Next we added food colour to milk and a small amount of dish washing liquid. 

We followed the same I predict, results and I wonder format. 

It was a very exciting lesson which led into what other experiments could we do and school and how could we alter today's experiments to achieve different results. 

Maths/Technology:

We had two challenges to complete with a 45 minute time allocation for each.

 Each group had 5 people (Leader, Scribe, Questioner, Timer, Resource Collector). 

Challenge 1: Using only one bag of mini marshmallows and one packet of spaghetti construct the tallest tower in a 45 minute time period. 

Challenge 2: Using only 1 roll of toilet paper create the largest area and perimeter you can (each sheet of toilet paper must be touching). 

There was lots of team building, leadership, supporting each other, math language and fun being had! 

Challenge 1 was definitely the class favourite, although this may have been purely due to being able to eat the marshmallows at the end!