Boundary Breaker: If you could change one thing about our school, what would it be? How would it help everyone?
In math today we put a twist on our Some Sum game and turned it into Some Difference. Students were asked to build a subtraction problem with the largest difference from four randomly chosen digit cards. We added the terms minuend and subtrahend to our math vocabulary and used math talk to explain our strategies. Students considered if there was more than one way to land on the biggest difference and how the place value of each digit came into play. We were having such fun that we extended the game one step further to consider the best strategy for landing on a difference that came closest to 20.
As we head into our study of ancient civilizations, we took time today to complete our Shipwrecked game. Students chose the necessary items for survival and considered basic needs to live and how those needs develop as a society becomes more established. They saw the progress from finding food, water, and shelter, to creating laws, division of labor, and even recreation. We read the book Westlandia, by Paul Fleischman to look at Wesley and his journey of creating his own civilization. This brought to light our nine cultural universals: geography, family, economics, communication, government, recreation, beliefs, education, and resources (food. clothing, shelter).
