Monday 26 August 2013

Tuesday 27 August: Junior ALiM

Today we experimented using some different place value equipment to make our two digit number.  We used sticks, animal strips, place value blocks and a place value abacus.  On the abacus we could see that where we placed the rings determined a number's total value.  If we put 5 rings in the ones place it made 5, but if we put the 5 rings in the tens place, then it made 50.  Mrs Culling was very very impressed at how we were able to make our numbers on the equipment so quickly. 
Luna's number: 2 tens and 0 ones

Stella's number

Holly's number

Kate's number.  We talked about that if Kate had to add 1 more to her number it would be 50.  Then there would be 5 rings in the tens place and 0 in the ones.

Adding 1 with the cards.


Ways to make ten with the animal strips.

Thinking of our rhyme helped us make 10 (5 and 5, swim and dive)

Kate made some more complicated number sentences.


We have 5 toes on each foot, so we used feet pictures to count in fives.  Who can see that counting in fives always ends in a 5 or a 0?



The ace card is one.  Holly adds 1 and 2.  This is quick practice of adding.  Everyone was very enthusiastic doing this ... it got noisy in the red room!

seven and three - time for tea!

Thursday 22 August 2013


 Friday 23 August

Congratulations to Jessica and Brooke who now have over 2000 e-ako points.  They have both been extremely hard working ALiM students.  It is always good when students draw from knowledge gained through an e-ako task and use it in our sessions.  Today Room 18 were confident talking about how many dot images Mrs Culling was holding up and they were up to explain how they knew, e.g 1000 x 10 is 10,000.  The e-ako activity had given them a great insight into multiplying and dividing by 10.

Room 17 ALiM 
This is our second to last week of ALiM lessons!
Monique on e-ako.
Giogia is making a bubble puzzle to help learn some unknown basic facts.
Amy and Monique made a game of 'snatch' for Room 12.  They made number sentences using hundreds, tens and ones for the Year 4 children.  We'll look forward to getting some feedback from them soon.

Ella is recording a 'Think Link' to help her see connections between the fact that she is learning: 6x7=42, to other number sentences, such as 60 x 7 and 6 x 8.

Monique said that she preferred Lisa's method to solve the subtraction problem: 672-284.  The only strategy that nobody said they understood was Sam's method.  Secretly, Mrs Culling loves Sam's method!


George has made flash cards, a bubble puzzle and is now working on a 'Think Link' to learn his x 9.

  Remember to start with the biggest number to divide (share).  I couldn't use whole numbers to share 8 muffins between 72 people!

A calculator is a handy tool when you know how to 'drive' it properly.

Amy's ski run took 68.44 seconds.  If she was 3/10 (three tenths) faster, what would her time be?  Ella is using the place value flip chart to help solve this.

Everyone made up their own question using 'Amy's Ski Race' information and the rest of the group solved it.

Jason and Giorgia are having a game of 'Nice or Nasty'.  We tried a couple of variations to the original game!



 Mrs Culling read us a story called the 'Maths Curse' by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith.  It is about a poor boy whose teacher (Mrs Fibonacci) says to him "YOU KNOW, you can think of almost everything as a maths problem."

He then saw everything in his daily life as a math problem.
Mrs Culling got us to figure out the Fibonacci (Fib - on - ar- chi)sequence and see if we could continue it.   



SOCIAL STUDIES is a geography problem:

TheMississippi River is about 4,000 kilometres long.  
An M&M is about 1 centimetre long.
There are 100 cm in a metre and 1,000 m in a km.

1. Estimate how many M&Ms it would take to measure the length of the Mississippi River.

2. Estimate how many M&Ms you would eat if you had to measure the Mississippi River with M&Ms.
Mrs Culling says that she'll put the curse on us next week and we'll solve some more of these questions.  Then we'll make up some of our own.Thanks Mr Harris for visiting today. We are very privileged that the Board of Trustees values the programme so much and has enabled Mrs Culling to work with these two fantastic Year 8 groups.  Mrs Culling's favourite day of the week is Friday - ALiM... all morning!          

Mrs Culling had to write the blog for Room 17 today as everyone was under the 'Maths Curse' and had to listen to the end of the story.  It has taken Mrs C about 30 minutes to do this - she estimates that's 15-20 minutes longer than it would take two ALiM students working together! 



 Playing Nice or Nasty.

 Calculating the scores!
Counting in the guessing game!
Making number 1000000 bigger!
Amelia Showing us her trick for 7 time tables.

Wednesday 21 August 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqWD6i3whc

This is a trick to learning 7 time tables!  Amelia showed this to us!1

Monday 19 August 2013

Junior ALiM children were busy today!
As the children came into the red room, they had to read the numbers.




Then everyone chose a number and made it with the place value equipment.



Math Adventures: find a number on the 100 board

Math Adventures: what is the number before or after ...

We used the numicon as we sang our bonds to ten song.

We like the 'Friends of Ten' ipad game

2 and what makes 10?

Roll a fact board game.  It is like connect four.

How many dots?  How do you know?

Thursday 15 August 2013

MATHS WEEK CHALLENGES
This week is Maths week.  For every correct question we earned 20 math dollars.  Mrs Culling said if we got $250.00, we'd earn a chocolate fish.
There were questions about:
  • cupcakes
  • train timetables
  • reading the time
  • magic squares
  • shapes
  • New Zealand food, money and climate
  • powers of numbers
  • what went wrong (some badly spelt road signs and markings)
  • And we now know that a French mathematician called Blaise Pascal invented the calculator.  Thanks Mr Pascal - it was a tool that was used quite a bit in our session today!
For homework Room 17 are looking at Mrs Culling's cell phone plan.  Mrs C didn't think that she was getting a good deal and has now changed to a different plan.  Has she done the right thing?
Some things that we discussed were: how many texts a day did it average out as and how many cents per text was it costing.  

For Math Week, Mrs Longman has challenged the school with this:

12+3-4+5+67+8+9=100

Can you come up with one other representation of 100 with 9 digits in the right order and mathematical operations in between. (I've heard of at least 3 possible solutions so far!)

Giorgia and Jason are trying various calculations on Mr Pascal's calculator in order to see if Mrs Culling was right to change her cell phone plan.






I think the person who painted this road marking needs to go back to school!

Brooke's haul of chocolate fish!  2 fish for being first to answer the 'Essential Resources' questions, 1 for being her group's e-ako champion and 1 for getting $250 math week dollars.  Poor Mrs Culling will be broke if Brooke keeps this up!