New Ideas Abound at Creativity Festival 2012

Sixteen students from fifth and sixth grade joined me at the Science Museum of Minnesota for the 19th Annual Creativity Festival sponsored by Success Beyond the Classroom.  Students attended three sessions each.  The sessions included African drumming, breakdancing, stop motion animation, storytelling, engineering with wind, structures, kumihimo, rhythm and poetry and more.  It was an action packed, interactive day. The students experienced and tried their hand at some new skills and ways of looking at the world around them. We even had a bit of time to explore the museum between classes. What a great day!

Making Our Brains Hurt.....

Second grade Resource Room math students are hard at work doing addition and subtraction with very large numbers.  We are continuing our exploration of "Fairy Tale Math".  Our latest story involved figuring out exactly how much candy was on the house that Hansel and Gretel found in the woods.  Adding all those jelly beans, chocolate, gum drops and peppermints meant numbers in the thousands and the need for regrouping.  Then we discovered that Hansel and Gretel ate some of the candy and we needed to subtract!  That required more regrouping.  The children used place value  cubes, rods and flats to help them with all of this.  They could immediately see the need to regroup as they solved these delicious  problems.