Discover the Secret of Using Leaves in A Science Investigation

October, my favorite month.  October means football (Ohio State, of course), cooler weather, and gorgeous leaves. (It is also the month my husband and I were married.) In October, we see the leaves turning colors, and the deciduous trees shedding their leaves.

The leaves in our neighbor's yard have already begun to fall into ours which aggravates my husband because he is the one who gets to rake them. Maybe focusing on some activities using leaves will divert his attention away from the thought of raking leaves to science investigations.  

Remember ironing leaves between wax paper?  We did that in school when I was a little girl (eons and eons ago).  Here is how to do it.

1. Find different sizes and colors of leaves.
2. Tear off two sheets about the same size of waxed paper.
3. Set the iron on "dry".  No water or steam here!
4. The heat level of the iron should be medium.
5. Place leaves on one piece of the waxed paper.
6. Lay the other piece on top.
7. Iron away!

You can also use this activity to identify leaves.  According to my husband who knows trees, leaves and birds from his college studies, we "waxed" a maple leaf, sweet gum leaf, elm leaf, cottonwood leaf (the state tree of Kansas - they are everywhere), and two he doesn't recognize because they come from some unknown ornamental shrubs.

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Maybe you would like to use leaves as a science investigation in your classroom. I have one in my Teacher Pay Teachers store that is a six lesson science performance demonstration for grades K-2. The inquiry guides the primary student through the scientific method and includes: 

1. Exploration time
2. Writing a good investigative question
3. Making a prediction
4. Designing a plan
5. Gathering the data
6. Writing a conclusion based on the data. 

Be"leaf" me, your students will have fun!

Can Pattern Sticks Revolutionize Your Math Understanding?

Most elementary teachers use a Hundreds Board in their classroom.  It can be used for introducing number patterns, sequencing, place value and more. Students can look for counting-by (multiplication) patterns. Colored disks, pinto beans or just coloring the squares with crayons or colored pencils will work for this. Mark the numbers you land on when you count by two. What pattern do they make? Mark the counting-by-3 pattern, or mark the 7's, etc. You may need to print several charts so your students can color in the patterns and compare them. I usually start with the 2's, 5's and 10's since most children have these memorized.

On the other hand, the Hundreds Board can also be confusing when skip counting because there are so many other numbers listed which easily create a distraction.  I have found that Pattern Sticks work much better because the number pattern the student is skip counting by can be isolated. Pattern Sticks are a visual way of showing students the many patterns that occur on a multiplication table.  Illustrated below is the pattern stick for three. As the student skip counts by three, s/he simply goes from one number to the next (left to right).

Martian Fingers

For fun, I purchase those scary, wearable fingers at Halloween time. (buy them in bulk from The Oriental Trading Company - click under the fingers for the link.) Each of my students wears one for skip counting activities. I call them the Awesome Fingers of Math! For some reason, when wearing the fingers, students tend to actually point and follow along when skip counting.

Most students enjoy skip counting when music is played. I have found several CD's on Amazon that lend themselves nicely to this activity.  I especially like Hap Palmer's Multiplication Mountain.  My grandchildren think his songs are catchy, maybe too catchy as sometimes I can't get the songs out of my mind!

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Think about this.  As teachers, if we would take the time to skip count daily, our students would know more than just the 2's, 5's and 10's.  They would know all of their multiplication facts by the end of third grade. And wouldn't the fourth grade teacher love you?!?

IMPORTANT:  If you like this finger idea, be sure that each student uses the same finger every time to avoid the spreading of germs. Keeping it in a zip lock bag with the child’s name on the bag works best. (Believe it or not, when I taught fourth grade, the students would paint and

decorate the fingernails!)

To help your students learn their multiplication facts, you might like the resource entitled Pattern Sticks. It is a a visual way of showing students the many patterns on a multiplication table. It also teaches how you to use the pattern sticks to recognize equivalent fractions, reduce fractions, and to change improper fractions to mixed numbers.

Learn the Foolproof Method to Stop Your Classroom Calculators from Disappearing

I teach at a community college which I love. I also spend three hours a week in the Math Lab which is a place where our students can come for math tutoring, to study or just to work in a group. It is staffed by math instructors. We try to have the supplies available that our students might need like a stapler, hole punch, white boards, pencils, scrap paper etc. We also have a set of scientific calculators which our students may borrow while in the Math Lab. 

Most of our items tend to remain in the Math Lab. Of course, a few pencils disappear now and then, but generally, most supplies seem to stay put EXCEPT for the calculators. Now I must say, students who take these home do so unintentionally. They just pick it up, slip it in their backpack and head out the door. Fortunately, most students are honest and eventually return the calculators to us. The dilemma is we only have so many calculators; so, we want to make sure that if a student needs one, it is on hand. We needed to find a way to make sure the calculators didn’t walk off.

One of our team members came up with an innovative but simple solution.

She purchased small clip boards and attached the calculator to it by using Gorilla tape. The calculators are still accessible, but much too big or bulky to accidentally stick into a backpack. In addition, since they are on a clip board, they are easy to stand and display in the white board trays. At the end of the day, it is simple to count them to make sure none are missing. This idea has worked so well, that some of our math instructors are now using this method in their classrooms.

So if you teach math, and have a set of classroom calculators, why not give this idea a try?

Using a Back to School Glyph to Gather Student Data with Ease

Sometimes I think teachers believe glyphs are just fun activities, but in reality, glyphs are a non-standard way of graphing a variety of information to tell a story. It is a flexible data representation tool that uses symbols to represent different data. Glyphs are an innovative instrument that shows several pieces of data at once and requires a legend/key to understand the glyph. The creation of glyphs requires problem solving, communication as well as data organization.

Remember Paint by Number where you had to paint in each of the numbers or letters using a key to paint with the right color? How about coloring books that were filled with color-by-number pages? Believe it or not, both of these activities were a type of glyph.

For the fall, I have created a Back to School Glyph. Not only is it a type of graph, but it is also an excellent activity for reading and following directions. Students are to finish the Glyph using the nine categories

listed below.

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1. Draw a road to the school (girl or a boy?)
2. Trees (age?)
3. Flowers (pets or no pets?)
4. How did you get to school today? (transportation)
5. School Yard (what do you like to do best?)
6. The Sky (what grade are you in?)
7. School Flag (prefer outside or inside?)
8. Name (number of letters in first name)
9. School House (prefer books or T.V.?)

Reading the completed glyph and interpreting the information represented is a skill that requires deeper thinking by the student. Students must be able to analyze the information presented in visual form. A glyph such as this one is very appropriate to use in the data management strand of mathematics.  If you are interested, just click under the resource cover page.