Dough, Dough and More Dough!

It has been an exciting past two days at Janney Elementary School! Ms. Miller was absent yesterday due to the weather, so I had to teach the class all day by myself. We had a two hour delay, which only left a Readers Workshop, Writers Workshop and math lesson. This is the second math lesson I have taught the class and it continuing our multiplication lesson from the day before. We did Multiplication Math Stories with arrays and because of the limited time, we didn't rush, but the students weren't given time to complete their daily math journal page. I asked Ms. Miller to review with the students today to make sure they understood what we went over yesterday and they knew everything! I was nervous nobody would raise their hand, but they knew it! We reviewed arrays, what the multiplication number model would look like and how to draw an array. The students did a great job! I am so proud of them and proud of myself for teaching it correctly!

Today we did a science lesson to prepare for tomorrow's Social Studies/Science lesson. We will be covering the North American Landscape, so to make it more hands on, today we made Salt Dough. The recipe is as follows:

2 cups flour

1 cup salt

1 cup water

Food coloring (optional)

The classroom is set up with six tables, each with four students, as shown below:

I supplied the students each with a bowl, a spoon and all the ingredients needed to make the salt dough. We made six colors of salt dough: blue, green, red, yellow, orange and purple.

Surprisingly, it wasn't too messy and the lesson was finished in about 30 minutes. Tomorrow each table will get a map of North America pasted on a piece of carboard and will have to build the North American landscape out of the various colors. As a class we will design a color coded legend for six different landforms and then the students will use the colors to build onto the map. This will give them a visual representation of the North American landscape, including; water, hills, mountains, islands, volcanos, etc. I will take some photographs of those and post them up here soon. 

I have begun grading homework that I have recieved from the students. I asked them to design maps of their bedrooms. I think some of them forgot that a map is supposed to be a birds eye view, so I think I will have to review that with the students. 

Other than that, I am feeling much more comfortable teaching lessons. Ms. Miller has been a great resource for information and is constantly helping me out with whatever I need. The students are active participants and seem to really enjoy the lessons I have been doing with them. It has been a great week thus far. Snow and all.