Wonderopolis

Did you notice that Ms. Lirenman added the Wonderopolis widget to the right side of our class blog? Go look if you haven't seen it but come right back.  Now that you have noticed it you are probably wondering why?

While learning with friends (yes Ms. Lirenman spends a lot of time learning new things too) she was introduced to the Wonderopolis website.  Each day Wonderoplis puts up a question to get us wondering.  The questions cover all different topic areas.

Today's question was "Where is the Hottest Place on Earth?" Immediately we had some ideas but first we had to close our eyes and really think about the question.  Then we shared our thinking by turning and talking to our friends.  Ms. Lirenman noticed a common theme as most of us thought the desert was the hottest place on earth.

The cool thing about Wonderopolis is that they answer all the questions that they ask. If you click on the question of the day you are taken to their website, and more specifically to the answer.   Today we were really curious and had to check the web site to get the "real" answer.   As you can imagine  we were super excited to see that a desert is the hottest place on the earth.  But what was even better is that we were able to watch a little video and learn even more about which desert in particular.  If you are interested you can watch the video too by following this link.

After we watched the video we wondered some more and just had to ask the Wonderopolis people, so we did.  And guess what, they answered our question.

Wondering is wonderful and we need to do it every single day.  What are you wondering about?

We're Smarter Than You Think....

Today during Free Choice Friday a couple of us were using the Let's Create! Pottery HD Lite app to create pottery.  If you don't know the app it's quite a lot of fun. You are given a lump of clay on a spinning wheel and you can manipulate the clay to create pottery.  Anyhow as we were creating we realized that what we really wanted to do was paint our new pottery pots.  So guess what we did?

Well, yesterday in math Ms. Lirenman taught us how to take a screen shot so that we could take what we created in the Tens Frame app and add it to the Draw and Tell app.  Since we are smarter than you think  when we finished creating our pottery we remembered how to take a screen shot, and we did.  Then we uploaded our pottery screen shot into Draw and Tell and used the tools  to decorate them. Aren't we smart!  It certainly made Ms. Lirenman smile.  She knows we are really smart, but she loves it when we use our brains to solve our problems.

A New Student - Shayoni

We are pleased to welcome Shayoni to our class.  She joined us on Monday, June 4th. We are lucky to have her join us.  She is our fourth new student this year.

Tens Frames Math

Today we used the Tens Frame app to create number sentences for twenty.

We also used the Draw and Tell app to talk about what we did while using the Tens Frame app.  Along the way we learned how to take a screen shot and how to save our work to the photo album.  Here is a small sample of our work.

Playing with Draw and Tell - What We Like About Frog and Toad

Today while Ms. Lirenman and Ms. Will were at a special reading workshop we worked with Ms. Betts and explored the Draw and Tell App on the iPad. We've used this app before but we usually use it to draw with not to write with.  Today we used it to write about what we liked about the story and the movie Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel.  Ms. Lirenman has a million ideas in her head of ways that she can use this App to help us with our learning.  While we only have 3.5 weeks of school left we feel pretty confident that we will be using it some more in the future.

A View from Our Window - Flat Classroom Collaborative Piece

We have mentioned a few times that we were part of group two in our Flat Classroom project.  We even mentioned that there were other groups involved too.  What you may not have realized is that every class was contributing to one collaborative project entitled "A View from our Windows". Well our multi group collaborative project is finally finished.  If you look carefully you will recognize some of the pictures on one of the pages.  Be sure to click on the picture below. It will take you directly to our youblisher book.

Our Other Math Stations

We have already shared that during our word problem math unit we have used the Screen Chomp and the Show Me apps on the class iPad to draw and record our own number sentences.  We also showed you some of the silly movies we made as we acted out number sentences.  But, we haven't told you about our two other math rotations.

The first rotation was inspired by Mrs. Wideen's grade one class in Ontario.  Ms. Lirenman read her blog post on word problems.  Mrs. Wideen talked about having a word problem on a label, putting the label into a notebook then drawing and writing the number story.  It's solving math in pictures, numbers and words.

Here are some samples of our math in pictures, numbers, and words.

          

For our fourth rotation we had to do the pictures, numbers, and words on our own.  While it was a bit challenging at first, we certainly got the hang of it and were pretty creative with what we were writing.

Learning about math has never been so much fun.  How have you learned about word problem math?