Okay... I know this post is coming later then usual, but I had to leave school for a doctor's appointment and this is the first chance I have had to sit down at a computer since I have been home. Today was such a GREAT day that I can not miss telling everyone at home all about it. It was a day of ACTIVITIES, EXPLORATIONS, and DISCOVERIES. The kids and I were SUPER busy, but oh my goodness did we ACCOMPLISH a lot!
Our morning started with a lesson over just really how much is a million anyway. Number sense and estimation is hard for so many of them to understand so since we are reading "If You Made a Million" I decided we needed to do some investigating to better understand how much one million really is. We began by tracing our feet. Once our feet were traced and cut out we added 20 stickers to each of the cut outs. After laying the feet down and figuring that we were looking at only about 760 dots with only our class, we began exploring the idea of looking at both of the third grade classes. When that still wasn't enough we did some more estimating and included EVERY class from Eisenhower! To our surprise the ENTIRE school only accounted for about 8,500 stickers. We were still a LONG WAY OFF of our 1,000,000 goal. Throughout the lesson we were able to figure out that it would take approximately 118 schools the size of our school to have 1,000,000 stickers in hand. Then we investigated further and found out that our feet only took about 1/3 of the hallway when laid end to end. After some more calculating we discovered we would need about 590 hallways the length of ours if we wanted our 1,000,000 stickered feet to lay end to end in a straight line. This was A LOT of thinking and problem solving, but the kids did an AMAZING job with it!
We then spent some time actually trying to SPEND $1,000,000. The kids had fun with this, but they did find it was a little harder to get rid of that money then they thought it would be. Some of them started out buying items that cost $450 but quickly realized they would be searching that newspaper ALL DAY LONG before their list added up to $1,000,000 unless they switched gears and started buying some real-estate and fancy vehicles. Anytime you have the chance to take them shopping with you it is a great opportunity for them to start seeing how much things cost! Number sense and estimation are pretty tough skills to master and the more real life practice we can offer them the better they will get at it!
After our discussion we moved right in to finishing up FLAT STANLEY. We even looked at my daughter, Kailey's, flat person that she made when she was in school. The kids are in the process of making a flat person that looks like them to send out into the world to learn some things to share with our class. They all seem to be SUPER excited about this and it was so much fun watching them design their mini me's! Before long they will be coming to you for an address so we can mail them out.
Flat Kailey just so happened to visit the Denver Mint on her adventure which led us right in to our lesson about how a coin actually becomes a coin. We read a story about how this happens and then discussed that we were working with one million this morning, but the Denver Mint actually makes about 40 million coins EVERY DAY! WOW! That fact really got us excited. After learning so much about coins we decided to try and make a few "MINT CONDITION" coins of our own by cleaning the coins we had in our room. We used vinegar, salt, toothbrushes, and white cleaning cloths. Our pennies look FABULOUS if I don't say so myself.
Again, it was just TOO GOOD of day to not tell you all about it! They may have had an English morning work paper and a math journal page to finish up tonight, but other then that we were WAY TOO BUSY LEARNING to do much paper pencil stuff today!
Have a WONDERFUL evening!
~Mrs. Jenkins
Our morning started with a lesson over just really how much is a million anyway. Number sense and estimation is hard for so many of them to understand so since we are reading "If You Made a Million" I decided we needed to do some investigating to better understand how much one million really is. We began by tracing our feet. Once our feet were traced and cut out we added 20 stickers to each of the cut outs. After laying the feet down and figuring that we were looking at only about 760 dots with only our class, we began exploring the idea of looking at both of the third grade classes. When that still wasn't enough we did some more estimating and included EVERY class from Eisenhower! To our surprise the ENTIRE school only accounted for about 8,500 stickers. We were still a LONG WAY OFF of our 1,000,000 goal. Throughout the lesson we were able to figure out that it would take approximately 118 schools the size of our school to have 1,000,000 stickers in hand. Then we investigated further and found out that our feet only took about 1/3 of the hallway when laid end to end. After some more calculating we discovered we would need about 590 hallways the length of ours if we wanted our 1,000,000 stickered feet to lay end to end in a straight line. This was A LOT of thinking and problem solving, but the kids did an AMAZING job with it!
We then spent some time actually trying to SPEND $1,000,000. The kids had fun with this, but they did find it was a little harder to get rid of that money then they thought it would be. Some of them started out buying items that cost $450 but quickly realized they would be searching that newspaper ALL DAY LONG before their list added up to $1,000,000 unless they switched gears and started buying some real-estate and fancy vehicles. Anytime you have the chance to take them shopping with you it is a great opportunity for them to start seeing how much things cost! Number sense and estimation are pretty tough skills to master and the more real life practice we can offer them the better they will get at it!
After our discussion we moved right in to finishing up FLAT STANLEY. We even looked at my daughter, Kailey's, flat person that she made when she was in school. The kids are in the process of making a flat person that looks like them to send out into the world to learn some things to share with our class. They all seem to be SUPER excited about this and it was so much fun watching them design their mini me's! Before long they will be coming to you for an address so we can mail them out.
Flat Kailey just so happened to visit the Denver Mint on her adventure which led us right in to our lesson about how a coin actually becomes a coin. We read a story about how this happens and then discussed that we were working with one million this morning, but the Denver Mint actually makes about 40 million coins EVERY DAY! WOW! That fact really got us excited. After learning so much about coins we decided to try and make a few "MINT CONDITION" coins of our own by cleaning the coins we had in our room. We used vinegar, salt, toothbrushes, and white cleaning cloths. Our pennies look FABULOUS if I don't say so myself.
Again, it was just TOO GOOD of day to not tell you all about it! They may have had an English morning work paper and a math journal page to finish up tonight, but other then that we were WAY TOO BUSY LEARNING to do much paper pencil stuff today!
Have a WONDERFUL evening!
~Mrs. Jenkins
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Enjoy the pictures! These are a few of our penny cleaning and our stickered feet! | 
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