Monday stuff...

Normally I link up to Positive Points on a Monday but I was a little premature and listed most of them yesterday so today I thought I'd focus on what we've been doing in the classroom for the last couple of days.

Despite our exciting science lesson with breakages and water spills we did actually manage to finish writing up our experiment. There were some very nice drawings of the liquids in the various containers.

In Math we started looking at number lines and oh.my.word!! We are definitely going to have to spend a little bit of time on this concept.

I started the lesson by giving pairs of children a blank number line and 12 random numbers including a 0, four negative numbers and assorted positive ones - just to see what they would do with them.

It was interesting to say the least. Look at some of the first attempts.

Interesting ideas :) They hadn't decided where to put
the zero at this point.

This team had a different idea.

An unusual positive section - you'll notice that the
numbers progress in an unusual way. :)

After giving them all some time to decide what to do with their numbers I invited all the pairs to wander around the room and look at what other teams did. There were some interesting comments:

"They haven't left any spaces. You can't put 2 and 4 beside each other like that."

"Their negative numbers are different from ours."

"Why did they do that?"

We all gathered around one table and discussed the number line. I didn't say what was right or wrong but just asked some questions and listened to the discussion. Then we went to the one pair that (thankfully) had managed to do everything right :) and discussed their number line.

We talked about leaving spaces for missing numbers; we looked at their negative numbers and realized that they could keep going "forever and ever" in that direction (and the other teams couldn't!); we realized that people had put their zeroes in different places on the number lines but it didn't matter because the numbers still had to go in the right order on either side of the zero... It was fascinating!!

Everyone then went back and made any necessary changes to their own number lines and we moved on to some worksheets. The lesson just FLEW by - and it was great exploration.

Tomorrow I'm giving them all the same number lines but this time they'll be vertical. :) We'll see how much they all remember!!

Great lesson! I loved it!!

And finally - I saw these CUTE little place value ice cream cones outside our Grade 2 classrooms!! Aren't they nice?

Looking forward to another fun day of exploration tomorrow :)
Ciao for now