We decided to celebrate St. Patty's Day with a techie twist. For fun, we explored limericks. Our children loved these frolicking poems and had a blast creating them! Our three year old even jumped in on the fun. I used suggestions from Giggle Poetry to introduce the lesson. From there, everyone used their suggestion of choosing a one-syllable name to begin and let their creative juices flow. I played around with various media to publish the final results, however, our 4th grader quickly decided on creating a Scratch program. Hope you enjoy and leave with a smile on your face!
Who doesn't enjoy Greek Mythology? Our children were hooked last year after studying Story of the World: Ancient History. Rick Riordan's series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, has continued to fuel the fire around our house. We were all counting down the days until the big movie premier of The Lightning Thief. For me, I was trying to think of a way to merge "the big screen," literature, writing and technology because I knew there would much enthusiasm for a "Percy Project." After all, he is one of the coolest demi-gods around this century!
After reading The Lightning Thief (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) and watching the movie, create "bios" of the main characters. In addition, write a movie review highlighting any differences between the movie and the book. You may use any medium to create your project. Above all, be creative and have fun!
2nd Grade Project
After reading The Lightning Thief (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) and watching the movie, write a movie review highlighting your favorite parts. Use Google Docs to create your finished report. Also, try to find an image of the movie poster to include. When finished, use skitch to capture an image of your report to include on our website. Again, have fun!
As always, I am amazed at the mind of a child! This was a great lesson in bringing popular culture into our every day learning. Our children really enjoyed working on their projects and expressing their creativity. I may be biased, however, I think their work is worthy of "Olympus-style" praise.
We just finished studying the Battle of Hastings and the Norman invasion of Great Britain. Our fourth grader was assigned to write a biography on William the Conqueror as way to wrap up her study of this material. Needless to say, her enthusiasm level was not high. She slipped into deep thought for a minute and asked, "Can I do it with Scratch?" I know there is a time and place for writing biographies and I am not arguing the fact this is a necessary skill to acquire. However, being that this is history class, I thought this might work. As a matter of fact, I thought it might be fun to take an old idea and give it a techie twist. This is one of many advantages to living in the Age of Web 2.0.
For those of you who are not familiar with Scratch, it is a free programming language targeted at middle-school students created by the Lifelong Kindergarten program at MIT. It is a definite favorite at our house! For her to do this project, she had to apply logic, critical thinking, math, as well as, her knowledge of William the Conqueror. She chose to create an interactive report where you simply click on buttons to take you to the different content areas. Each page has a "home" button to return you to the start page. As you can see, this was a more challenging project than simply writing a biography. To quote Frost, she took the "road less travelled."
Fractions are always fun, right? I can hear the sighs and cringes even as I mention the word fractions. For some reason, even children who enjoy math are not fond of this concept. I wanted to share one of our adventures into the mysterious realm of fractions.
This problem came from the Singapore Math Intensive Level 5A and was included after studying operations with fractions. In typical fashion, our daughter completely ignores the accompanying diagram and sets out to solve this problem armed with her new math skills. She quickly found herself at an impasse and extremely frustrated.
I approached her and tried to see into her thinking strategies. Then, we realized the diagram!
She knew Ben's amount was equal to Joan's amount plus fifty. Also, that after Joan gave Ben 29 coins, her amount was equal to 1/3 of Ben's. Good start! Then, the trouble began. She kept adding 29 to 50 to get 79 and tried to divide this value by 3. Really close, but not quite! She kept running in to the problem that 79 is not divisible by 3. I asked her what she was trying to do with the amount of "79." She thought if she could divide this by three it would represent the amount in each rectangle for Ben. Still, close but not exactly correct.
After struggling with this for a while, she decided to put it away and move on to other problems. As a high school math teacher, I kept wanting to set up two equations with two unknowns and just solve it for her. I knew, though, she needed to keep struggling with it and work it out. So, she went to her dad and they wrote a Scratch program to solve it. Not exactly, the approach I would have taken, but it provided a different type of learning experience.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Scratch, it is a computer programming language developed by the Life-Long Kindergarten group out of MIT University. Our daughter has been using this for a couple of years to animating her drawings. She has been wanting to write a program that served a different purpose. So, she and her dad decided to tackle the dreaded "fractions problem". To quote my husband directly, he refers to their process as a "brute force" method of solving. They created a screencast to explain what they did and posted it to Vimeo. I also need to add that Abby was unimpressed with the names and decided to change them to something more creative like Percy and Ashley Kit. Check it out!
Actually, they did a slightly different problem in that they are trying to determine how many coins Joan has. Nevertheless, this was and is a really cool learning experience for our daughter.
Back to the problem...
From the program you see that Percy must have had 133 coins in the beginning and Joan would have had 83. Now, I still thought it was extremely important for her to know how to solve this problem without technology. So, after some time, she and I revisited the problem. This time, we decided to pay attention to the given diagram.
After a break, she realized her mistake. She had forgotten to add the 29 to Ben's total. So, really, we know that 2/3 of Ben's total could be found by adding 29+50+29. This equals 108. If you divide 108 by 2, it becomes apparent that each rectangle represents 54 coins. So, after receiving the 29 coins from Joan, Ben had (54*3) or 162 coins. To find the amount he had in the beginning, you simply subtract 29 from this total. So, 162-29 = 133. Therefore, Ben had 133 coins in the beginning. How many did Joan have? Well, you would subtract 50 from Ben's total. So, 133-50 = 83. This matches what Abby and her dad found using Scratch.
I have to say I had to fight the urge to just do things for her. That would be easier! I feel it is so important to allow students the opportunity to wrestle with concepts regardless of the discipline. Ultimately, if you do this, the student takes ownership of the problem and gets on the track towards developing genuine understanding.
All in all, this was a valuable learning experience for everyone. Here's what we discovered:
Technology is fabulous and really cool!
In order to use technology effectively, you still need a good foundation of the concept being studied.
Never ignore the diagrams!
Sometimes it helps to get a fresh start. Put it away for a while and revisit the problem later.
Our approach to education is multi-dimensional: exploratory, creative, hands-on, and integrated with technology. The ultimate goal is to create an environment that fosters inquiry, creativity and a genuine love of learning. I feel this experience has provided our daughter the opportunity to "think outside of the box" while having a meaningful learning experience. I think this is a problem she will not soon forget.
P.S. It's okay to have a "P.S." on a blog post, right? I really am excited that our children have such a wonderful dad who is extremely involved in their education. Not many kids have a dad who is a physics professor! It has really opened many doors to them and given them many wonderful opportunities. I can't wait to share what we have been doing with circuits! Anyway, please check out his blog if you are interested in physics and how things work in general. Lots of cool stuff at Dot Physics!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 12:48PM 
and watching the movie, create "bios" of the main characters. In addition, write a movie review highlighting any differences between the movie and the book. You may use any medium to create your project. Above all, be creative and have fun!
