B-B-Bats!

Did you get excited reading the title, thinking of the nostalgia of B-B-Bats candies? Sorry, this post is not giving you free taffy. (Wompwomp.) Instead, you get to see how we learned all about the nocturnal creatures last week.  Students cut and glued the sentence about bats into their book before copying the sentence to make it a little easier.  Notice our big vocabulary words: nocturnal and echolocation. ;)

We worked on estimation. I tried to help them make a good guess by scaffolding their understanding of estimation.  I showed them how much one, ten and one hundred candy corn look like.  Then I showed them another bag with a mystery amount of candy corn.  We went through each bag and I asked which had more or less.  Most of us agreed that the mystery bag belonged somewhere between 10 and 100.  Yet I had estimates ranging from 8 to 10,000.  Clearly we still need to work on our estimation skills.

We also had a special assembly last Thursday ... some of you may have heard about it.  It's called the Magical Math Tour and it gets students excited about math concepts through fun magic tricks!  Unfortunately, it also teaches kids that it's okay to write on money... and convinced kids that you could "marry" a girl just by giving her a balloon flower and spinning her around.  See, the magician needed an assistant for one of his tricks.  I was chosen as the lucky lady --- and after the assembly, every K-2 student I saw said "Ooooh, Miss Francis, you got maaaarrrriiiiieeeed." (To which I was utterly puzzled, because I don't know how any of that translated to marriage. I had to reply "No, guys, I'm actually not. I don't actually know that person.")

Anyway, my students this year couldn't take their eyes of the balloon flower! So I told them I'd give the flower to the person who sat the most nicely for the remainder of the assembly.

As for the dollar.... somehow after I wrote my name on it, it was mysteriously pulled out of a brand new, untouched LEMON.  I was amazed. But also unhappy that I couldn't spend the dollar for fear someone would get upset with me for writing my name on money!  So I spent it down in South Carolina when I visited David this weekend....  hopefully no one there knows a Miss Francis. ;)