sutton007

Grab your pogo stick and hop your way right into the Guinness Book of Records! That's what I think my students will be doing after our lesson on MAIN IDEA and supporting details.  The worksheet being used to review the skill had information about a gentleman who climbed up and down Mt. Fuji on his pogo stick.  Imagine the stamina and strength it would take to accomplish this feat! As the students continued reading they became fascinated by Ashrita Furman , the man who holds over a hundred other records in the Guinness Book of Records. The students started asking lots of great questions .  Why did he decide to break the records?  How many records did he break? Where is he from?  Why did climbing Mt. Fuji on a pogo stick bring inner peace? (the paragraph mentioned it brought Ashrita inner peace)  What is inner peace?  Is he still alive? Not realizing the interest this would spark , we decided to take a few moments to research this unusual record-brea...

"2 or 20?" asks the teacher? "Twenty, twenty...twenty," whispered the students on team B. Students in the class of a second grade teacher were totally engaged playing a math game (seen in the second part of the video below). As a way to get my students thinking about "Place Value", I decided to try this with my class at the beginning of school . So we played "101 and Out" with the whole class a couple of times. Getting the hang of it quickly, the students were able to play against a partner. Here is the video from Teaching Channel if you'd like to see how it works: At first I thought the game might be too baby-ish for fourth graders. It was just right to start the year. Soon they will play a variation called "1001 and Out ". Just changing the rules a bit to suit the higher place value needs. "High Number Toss" was the next game we played to help students with reading, writing and comparing larger numbers (into th...