Multiplication/Division

A group of seven 3^rd and 4^th graders have been learning all about multiplication and division this winter.  With multiplication, they started with cluster problems which break large problems such as 358x27 into small clusters of easily known multiplication sentences such as: 300x2, 300x20, 50x20, etc.  Once the smaller problems are solved, students figure out which cluster will help them solve the initial problem.  This was a way for children to see how a large multiplication problem could be broken into smaller pieces.  

Our next look at multiplication came in the form of the lattice method.  Students learned how to set up the problem and place the numbers in a way that they would add together to get the correct solution.  This was a favorite method for many of the students.  

The last multiplication method we tried out was the traditional algorithm.  Some of the students had seen this method before and took to it immediately; many still favor the lattice method.  Students are encouraged to use which ever method they understand and can easily use.  

With division we started with “short” division.  Problems such as 75÷3 where there are no remainders.  We then played games such as Leftovers and Roll a Remainder to look at what it means to have a remainder and did “short” division problems such as: 82÷4 and 65÷6.  As we got more confident in our efforts, we have moved on the long division and have even worked on 6-digit numbers divided by one-digit.  Many students are still practicing and honing their division skills at this point and work with teachers and on their own to get better at this skill.

GLIMPSES OF AFTER SCHOOL; FALL

The first day of the After School Program and the weather is lovely.  We ease into the afternoon with tales of summer.  Potluck with families at Ryder Park!

We have outdoor fun raking leaves, building fairy houses, playing tag and role playing.  We build structures and cavort in the woods and on the grass, gather on the play structure and teach each other football and soccer techniques.  Later we walk around the grounds to find a good place to start a garden as children offer suggestions for plants they’d like to include and the type of birdhouse we’ll need.  Milkweed pods are fascinating; discussion begins about the monarch butterflies that need them for food, then about planting seeds and their germination requirements, and we start a compost heap for snack and lunch scraps.  “The Victory Garden Kids’ Book,” by Marjorie Waters, and “Gardening with Children,” a Brooklyn Botanic Garden guide, inspire us. 

Art Studio is open.  Children create popsicle stick people, a mini-art studio, and a Zen plate, using glass beads, shells, and feathers to create assemblages.  Older children help younger friends learn to use glue sticks for projects.  Read Aloud is “The Goat in the Rug,” about a Navajo weaver and her goat, Geraldine, whose fleece the weaver cleaned, combed, dyed, spun and wove into a rug.  One child tells of watching spinners and weavers in Morocco last year, another tells about his grandmother spinning and knitting.   They all are enthusiastic about trying a future weaving project.

A sensory adventure begins: Children open each of 15 bags to feel, smell and taste dried herb samples from a local garden, then guess what each might be.  A key is used to identify each sample, and we talk about what the terms annual, biennial, and perennial mean.  Some take samples home, some make perfumes by grinding herbs and adding water.  Dolls, fairy houses and button characters are big art activities, and reverse painting on glass in picture frames is intriguing.  Enthusiasm for Legos and blocks and animals continues.

Big picture artists work with a 5 gallon bucket of water, paint rollers and brushes on the blacktop while other children practice a play, do exercises, or play on the structure.  Later we read “A Bad Case of Stripes.”

We enjoy working with clay, though processing our disappointments--acknowledging regret, promise, hope and validation of their effort--that, since the clay wasn’t wedged it wouldn’t be fired.  Our compromise is a photo of each child’s piece, and consensus to deconstruct clay pieces in a pail of water. Outdoors, in games of keep-away, Dr. Evil and other fantasy play, children freely running back and forth across the play-lot and into woods, give the impression of fluttering, floating flocks of birds!  They practice with soccer balls, play softball, catch, hand-clap games, build structures, have conversations on the swings, take walks in the woods.

Some learn the safe use of sticks as digging tools, and many blend using natural materials--grasses, dirt, stones, flowers, cross sections of branches--with ropes and the play structure.  There are acts of compassion between children, one lending a sweater to a chilly child...  Indoors the children explore the magnet table, create fusible bead forms, draw in sketchbooks and work on larger drawings and paintings.  We start reading “Voyage of the Poppykettle.”  Children are enthusiastic about starting an Engineering & Architecture Club—a topic for everyone to discuss at Morning Meeting.

The woods are temporarily off limits as we wait for the arborist to take down a dead and leaning tree, so after the rain, we do some puddle engineering.  Once we rinse off the mud, we get our hands into the wet clay! The children smack and splat and play with the reconstituted clay from last week, in effect kneading it into a uniform consistency, introducing them to the idea of wedging. 

On a no woods, no mud puddle day, we plant saplings donated by a guest arborist, and we finish our day with indoor play of make-believe in the wizarding world and with PlayMobile and plastic figures.

The woods are open for business!  We set tree markers to guard our saplings and visit the fabulous Nevelson assemblage in the woods.  More catch and soccer, swinging, adventures on the play structure, red wagon rides (and spills), imaginative role playing and, the favorite, wizarding.  We read a portions of “Katie says: The Volcano is a Girl” and “Cheetahs.” 

And, finally, a beautiful, sunny day!  Kick ball and football, wagon rides and scraped knees.  We talk of color and light and pretend to build campfires when the days become chilly. 

Cells, Trees and ESF (Written by Nora, Neona and Marina)

This year, Neona and Nora’s science class was learning about plant and animal cells. To get a better understanding of plant cells we visited E.S.F. (Environmental Science and Forestry.) We went there for two and a half hours and in that time we visited two different labs. 

The first one we went to was Chuck and Linda’s lab. They talked about the research they were doing. Linda has been working on putting new genes into American Chestnut tree for fifteen years to see if it can withstand blight (a fungus that has been killing these types of trees for a very long time.) She showed all of the different plants they had in the lab. They had at least five hundred American Chestnut trees in a nutrient solution called tissue culture. 

Linda showed us these cool machines (Laminar flow hoods) that had filters on the top and the side so that dirty air goes in the top and out the side. This is so that when people are working at the desk the experiments don’t get contaminated. When you breath in the clean air you can really tell the difference between the air. 

Then Linda gave us some hands on things to do. She showed us how to take embryos off calluses and how to take a callus off of the bottom of a plant. When we were working on the embryos we had to work under a microscope, that is partly what made the task hard to do. Taking the embryos off was difficult because they are so small it’s very hard to pluck them off. The shoots were easier because all we had to do was cut the leaves off and cut the shoot into three pieces to put into tissue culture to grow more trees. Doing this is part of Linda’s job. She has to do this because if she didn’t the trees would die.

After we were done with those tasks we went down to Marina’s Dad’s (John) lab. John’s lab was different than Linda’s. They both study trees but John studies the tree when it’s older and looks at the rings of the trees. He also goes to different places and sees where the trees were most prominent. It was very exciting. We got to look at the rings of trees and he showed us how to take a part of the tree without cutting it down. He

talked about what the rings meant. The rings show when the tree has had a rough year and when there was a lot of water. They also show when the tree was healthy and getting nutrients.

It was a fun and educational trip!

Glimpses of After School; Winter

On an early November day, we stay outdoors later than usual to soak up the gorgeous weather, and enjoy using soccer balls.   A few days later, rain and a cold wind keep us indoors for the first time this school year and one child pulls out his guitar while others choose games--Amazing Labyrinth, Jellybean Land--and play with blocks and animals.  Indoor activity over blustery wet days includes Rig-ama-jig; working together with the enormous wooden construction pieces and the chunky nuts and bolts, the children create amazing structures.

A donated plastic shopping cart is a huge hit on the play lot and a group of children invent Football Shopping Cart Tag.  When the temps dip, we shorten our outdoor play a bit; the rest of the week the kids still thoroughly enjoy the woods and play structure, and there is even sledding!  Sticks are used as magic, for making symbols in the snow, for building and as walking sticks.  Conversations about magic powers, and what inherent powers they see in one another, bubble.

In the Art Room, a child initiates a marker transfer project, drawing an image, dampening it, laying it down on another piece of paper.  Another shares her quack-quack origami (paper beaks) and goes on to fold other creatures and to write stories on the alpha smart. A pair starts a book making project, others enjoy the game Stratego and still others develop and improvise characters on-the-fly in their fantasy play.  One child prompts a pom-pom project and others join in cardboard, popsicle stick and hot glue constructions.  Safety concern leads to talk about skin and its layers, and we pull out a ‘Human Body’ pamphlet from a science shelf (Foss Science Stories) to read ‘The Frozen Man, by I.C. Mann, a story about a 5,000 year old iceman named Oetzi (from the Oetztal Alps) with discussion of the Stone and Bronze Ages.  

We hurry inside after the rains have caught us; it’s good to towel off wet hair and join the Ribbon Dance legacy or be part of an appreciative audience.   Cat’s cradle and tic-tac-toe engage us, and we some do research for a story on magic and home design.  The children examine their fossils from the Great Swamp Conservancy field trip and put together airplane models.  It’s a big day for blocks and animals, too! 

The children thoughtfully choose a good spot to install a seut feeder in the woods.  It’s a wild and windy day after a full moon and we come in for calm and quiet, drawing and making posters.  Later some cooperate and compete at Foosball, others play with blocks and animals.  Conversation turns to national issues of justice, which we explore respectfully.  A child gets very interested in counting and writes out equations and counts all the flags on the map of the world. 

An interesting project comes up: we measure the parking lot for the Building Committee!   Later, we plant daffodil bulbs in soil and put the pot on a windowsill in the art room.  The next day they go into the refrigerator for 3 weeks to stimulate growth after a wintry nap. Finally they take their place on the windowsill in the Sahara room where they will enjoy the sun.  We bring Jellybean Land upstairs for those who don’t choose to build with Rig-ama-jig, and the construction crew works together on their project. 

Outside, the enormous mounds of snow make for great sledding, and there’s much shoveling and mound exploring.  Once we shed boots, snow gear and snow, we realize that Spanish class is being held in the Dragon Room so we can’t get the materials we had hoped to use.  Instead, we work with oil-based modeling clay while we listen to a CD and happily recognize ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ when it comes around, singing along.

Despite rain, there is vigorous sledding and sliding on the snowbank!  Engineering and Architecture Club gathers to create dream landscapes in the mountains of the world, and to continue working a 3-D structure made out of cardboard, fabric, papers, popsicle sticks and various art supplies to create elements of interior space.  In the Sahara Room, we’re reading ‘I’m Bored,’  ‘Who’s a Pest?’ and started ‘The Desert Fox.’   As so often, there are acts of kindness: an origami crane offered to a child inconsolable over his own attempt; a block structure is downsized, to share parts with others collaborating with blocks and animals