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This past Wednesday, the entire fourth grade took the subway all the way downtown to South Ferry and hopped aboard a ferry to visit Ellis Island! This perfectly complements our literacy units for both reading and writing on historical fiction. We got a brief tour from a park ranger (our second National Park visited this year!) and then we had an audio tour. We got to see all sorts of things immigrants had to go through before entering this country. What is particularly cool is that not only is this a museum with artifacts, but it is the actual place where all these things happened! Of course, it was also a gorgeous day for a little cruise. Waiting for the ferry in front of one of NYC's 5 forts built for protection during the War of 1812. Excited to see Lady Liberty! (Cameo:Ms. Greenberg's coat.) Some of us may be making ambiguous facial expressions, but trust us, we were really excited to see Ellis Island! Here our Park Ranger is about to pretend to demonstrate the dreaded "buttonhook test" on our brave volunteer. The buttonhook test has nothing to do with buttons but everything to do with eyelids. If you failed this test, you might get detained in the health center on the island or worse, sent back to your home country! Each room and most artifacts had a code you could type in and listen to a commentary. Here pictured is a sample of graffiti that immigrants drew. The piece of the wall was preserved and the graffiti was done in pencil. It was lists of people's names and where they were from. In conclusion, NYC is our playground and we love it!
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The state tests may be over, but we have one more math question for you: What happens when a student brings in a Costco-sized tub of jelly beans to share? (Thanks, Angela!) A. Students get an inquiry-based lesson on estimation B. Students get to collaborate, discuss/justify their answers using logic/math C. Students get to eat the jelly beans D. All of the above The students took all the initiative and wrote down their guesses. We are trying to see whose guess is the closest to the actual amount of jellybeans in the container. Stay tuned... we wouldn't want to count (read: eat) all those jelly beans at once! Here are the jelly beans (yum!) and here is the book Great Estimations by Bruce Goldstone. It helped us hone in on our estimating techniques. Students are counting/serving/distributing jellybeans. We justified our answers by explaining our logic in writing. We also ate as we worked! Some of us approached the problem by using spatial/visual clues such as counting the amount of jellybeans per side of the container, then multiplying based on the assumed relative volume of the container. Some of us used whatever clues we had available. For example, Luca knew the serving size was 27 beans and there were 60 servings in the container. He then determined 3/4 of that number, since about 3/4 of the container had already been eaten. Meanwhile, Shehrin made a very logical assumption about Jelly Belly's advertised 49 flavors. Like Gavin, Grace used visual-spatial clues to estimate. This was the strategy provided by the book Great Estimations! Whatever the strategy, the point of the lesson was to use math to back up our conjectures. |
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June 2019
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