It’s All Good

Spent the morning at a food bank. Got a tour, met some interesting people, and bagged lots of pasta. Both of the kids came out of the building with huge smiles on their faces, and brimming with ideas for other ways to offer our services. We decided to have a once/month Do Good Deeds Day. Jay (the little list-maker) got out the pad of paper and jotted down all of our ideas. We could only think of a few so far, so we would appreciate any other ideas that anyone has.

Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

• volunteer at the food bank

• pick up litter at the park

• babysit for our neighbor

• send a package to a family we’ve “adopted” in Africa

• donate toys that we don’t use anymore

Any other ideas out there?

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Sugar-Coated Math

Cookie map finished, what to do with the leftover Smarties? (No need to worry about those little chocolate rosebuds. I ate them all last night after the kids went to bed.) I actually had it all planned out. No opportunity to teach goes to waste in this house. Can’t have fun, or just plain enjoy a treat without attaching some learning to it. So today’s big excitement was Smartie Math.

Here’s what we did:

1. We figured out how to balance a scale, then measured out 100g of candy for each of us. Explained about setting the scale to zero, and how to read the scale, talked about imperial vs metric.
2. We separated out the colors, and counted the number of Smarties in each color. Lots of excitement here. Comparing numbers, predicting results. Talked about spelling.
3. We added up the numbers to get our personal totals. Discussed adding strategies, showed Jay how to add the ones, then the tens.
4. Compared results. Tee had 90, Jay had 94, I had 92. Decided that our scale wasn’t that accurate, learned how to calculate the mean.
5. Made bar graphs to display results. Tee got practice, and Jay learned how to make one.
6. Compared graphs. Again, big excitement. I had more green! Look at how many pink I had! etc.
7. Noticed that while there was a range of numbers, they tended to bunch around 10 or so. Tee predicted that there were approximately equal numbers of each color in each batch of Smarties. Because there were 8 colors, he thought that the number of Smarties in each color group would be 1/8 of the total number of Smarties. Talked about predictions, hypothesese, and fractions. Decided to leave percentages to another time.
8. I gave them a math problem: If we had 90 Smarties in 100g, how many Smarties would we have in 1 kg? Talked about the prefix kilo, about the number of grams in a kilogram, the number of meters in a kilometer, and the different ways of solving the problem.

We showed great restraint, and only ate 5 Smarties each. Tee quite excited about making a bar graph to display the results using ALL of the smarties, hoping to prove his hypothesis correct.

To me, this little project is a good example of how much learning can take place in one interaction, and how multidisciplinary it can be. I didn’t have a plan other than making bar graphs, but the kids learned a lot of other things as well. They led the learning with their questions, and are extending it with their ideas.

 

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