Fall Collections and Patterning

Our fall table began as a simple collection of leaves and has been growing and changing ever since. Stones, seeds, seed pods, pinecones, glass beads and buttons are perfect for nature inspired patterning and storytelling. 

Nighttime Pumpkins

Love this project! We read Lio Lionni's book, Little Blue and Little Yellow, about two best friends. One day when they snuck out to be together they hugged and Little Blue and Little Yellow turned green! Our painting challenge involved drawing realistic looking pumpkins and painting them using only red, yellow and blue paint! 

This excited them and they were anxious to begin. The mixing was not to happen in the paint palette rather on their paper! Working on using long brushstrokes or ribbons of paint, they blended the red and yellow to make beautiful shades of orange. For the leaves, they dipped into the tiniest amount of blue and layered yellow to create varying shades of green. The stem was a mix of all three colours. 

The following day, they cut out their leaves and pumpkins and glued them on black construction paper. Using chalk pastels soft, glowing moons and stars were added to illuminate the night skies. Tendrils were created by rolling long strips of green paper and pipe cleaners around their pencils. 

Counting Collections

This week I introduced Counting Collections in Math. Students are partnered up and given a collection of objects to count together. Sounds simple, right? Important skills and understandings are developed through opportunities to count. As adults, we count with ease and it's hard to recall the complexity of skills involved in learning to count and making sense of quantity. Children develop important number concepts including:

• naming numbers
• sequencing numbers - ordering number names
• name and symbol relation - writing numbers 
• one to one correspondence - saying a number name for each object
• cardinality - the last number said is the total
• relative size - which is bigger
• base ten structure - how numbers go together (written and verbal)
• efficiency and accuracy - grouping objects to count and record efficiently
• representations - communicating ideas in words, numbers and drawings  

We kicked off with a read aloud by Lizann Flatt called Counting on Fall. If poses the question, what if animals and plants knew math like you? Would leaves fall in patterns? Would squirrels gather nuts in groups of five? Would birds always fly in flocks of ten? This got them thinking about strategies they use to count and what their eyes recognize at a glance. They were eager to start counting.

Having the students work in partners encourages dialogue and problem solving through the sharing of ideas and strategies. Teamwork allows students to learn from each other, build confidence and promotes risk taking. Here are the collections they could choose from. All of the collections, to start, were between 20 and 60. We will build up to larger collections in the hundreds over time.

They quickly got to work and it was easy to observe which strategies they were most comfortable with and what posed challenges.

This group arranged the clothes pins into groups of ten and counted 10, 20 and then counted on 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. When asked to count a different way they grouped them into fives.

This group went for pairs and skip counted by twos to 24. Skip counting to ten was easy, but was harder to 20 and more difficult after 20.

Another group opted for pairs to count the pompoms although they had to start over a couple of times because they lost count and couldn't remember which ones they had counted.

The buttons were grouped into rows of ten although they were tricky to count because they were so close together. 

This group also counted the pencil crayons by ones and chose to organize them in a circle to keep track.

The mini pompoms were counted first by ones, but that wasn't working well so they switched to groups of ten. There was one left over.

We reviewed and shared the strategies they used as a group and the following day talked about which strategies worked well and why. They determined that the larger the collection, the larger the groups. The smaller the collection, the smaller the groups. They also decided that you could start by twos and then regroup them into piles of ten from there. The second day, new partners and new collections provided new challenges. 

Next week, we'll add representation, having the students communicate and record their counting using words, numbers and drawings. 

Moonsquirters

The BC School Fruit and Vegetable Nutrition Program delivers healthy produce for students across British Columbia once a month. It was Fruit and Veggie day at school on Wednesday. Volunteer parents delivered six containers of delicious cherry tomatoes to our classroom. I passed the tomatoes out at lunch. I heard more, "no thank-yous" than "yes pleases" which reminded me of the perfect book for this veggie day!!! It took me a while to dig it out of my collection at lunch, but eventually I found it. We settled at the carpet for a story in the afternoon, inspired by tomatoes.

You can listen and watch a video of the story below! 

https://www.schooltube.com/video/77bd5e4a6a3fa612c522/

Here is the link to the BC Fruit and Veggie Program if you're interested.

http://www.sfvnp.ca

Gobble Gobble

We read a handful of lovely books on giving thanks, gratitude and thankfulness this week, with Thanksgiving coming this weekend. I adore this turkey art project and keep coming back to it year after year. Thank you Deep Space Sparkle, you inspire so many art projects in my classroom! This is a directed drawing lesson, using oil pastels, then watercolours finish it off. I just love how each turkey has its own personality, just like each and every child. The children each added what they're thankful for to their artwork and are proud to have them hanging in the gym for the Thanksgiving assembly tomorrow. These turkeys make me smile.

How do leaves get water?

The question guiding our experiment this week was, how do leaves get water? We used red food colouring to turn clear water a dark red. Normally we can't see water travelling through leaves but if we change the colour of the water, maybe we can! We trimmed the petiole (or stem) off of two different leaves, a maple and a nasturtium and observed the changes over three days. The children noted their observations through discussion, labeled and detailed drawings, and in notes. It was interesting to compare the two leaves through this process. The maple's petiole turned a pronounced red, as did the midrib and some veins, while the nasturtium was fainter in colour and the water seemed to collect in one section on the blade of the leaf. Ultimately, we could see the function of the xylem tubes carrying water up and through the entire leaf which was pretty cool.

We connected some of our descriptive observations to our laugh-out-loud morning read aloud, We Are Growing, by Laurie Keller and Mo Willems. The grass is all growing, and everyone is something-est except for Walt. He's not the tallest or the curliest or the silliest, he's not the anything-est. A surprise at the end brings about a personal discovery for Walt. We had some fun describing the leaves with reference to this book. The nasturtium was a the droopiest, wilty-est, crumply-est.

Here are some photos that capture the changes over the course of three days and some of the detailed observations the children recorded.

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Leaf Sewing

I came across this sewing activity on Pinterest and had to give it a go with the class. They have been collecting leaves daily, freshening up our leaf tub at the fall table so over the weekend I collected some beautiful leaves from the backyard that were just perfect for this project. Thick, waxy and big enough to lace! Great for fine motor development. I prepunched the holes, which in hindsight I probably should've let them do. I only have a few hole punches, which would've taken them a rather long time...not to mention the policing of how many holes should be punched. It's rather therapeutic, hole punching. Feeling slightly guilty, I brought out some random small punches - hearts, circles and stars - and let them punch to their hearts content at the fall table after this project was complete.

The inspiration…

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/58828338860072117/

Image from www.pinkstripesocks.com

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
Some of the leaves already had holes! I ended up with quite the collection of leaf confetti too. And yes, I did throw them up it the air outside (to celebrate fall of course).

There were lots of different strands of yarn to choose from. We taped off one end to be the threading end, or 'needle'. It is best described like a shoelace! The yarn was taped to the back of the leaf to secure.