Friday began with the elementary kids going over the "Problem of the Day" from yesterday. It involved a broken calculator and how you could solve a problem by manipulating the numbers so you wouldn't have to use the broken key. I sat at the table with the "Kindergartners" and visiting Pre-K kids from the preschool room. On Fridays, the students who will move to the elementary room next year come visit for the morning as an introduction. Today was Will's first day! I was filling in for Devon who had a sick Jack at home. As the older students worked with Paula, I heard the word "sum" being talked about. At our small table we began to talk about "sum", what it means and finding combinations that make a sum of 2, 3, 4, etc. Then we moved on to printing lowercase letters a, b, c, d and e. We practiced on the white board and students practiced on their own, writing the letters on a blank bingo card. Once our bingo cards were filled with letters, we played bingo using plastic coins to cover our letters. As we used the pennies, nickels and dimes we talked about their names, values, colors and size. We talked about the penny being the only copper colored coin and how weird it was that the dime was smaller than the nickel, but worth more!
It was then evident that we needed to mix things up as students got restless. We headed to the library and continued to work with sums. We used the five students as counters and we came up with all the possibilities to make the sum of "5". We kept track on the white board. Then I joined the group and we did the same thing for "6". I talked to them about even numbers explaining that when everyone had a partner, the number was even. We looked at 5, 6 and many other numbers to determine if they were even or odd.
Then one students said, "Let's make letters with our bodies!" And so we did. I took pictures of the kids so they could see what they looked like. We made the letters we practiced earlier.
After over an hour of hard work, it was time to go run around in the gym! Check out our letters below!