Titanic Tangrams

Miss Powless’ fabulous fours and fives 

created these Titanic renderings using Tangram shapes

and the SMART Notebook software.

Are You Smarter Than a 5th (or 4th) Grader?

 Miss Powless’ grade 4/5 class at OMSK recently created their own geometric solids.

They were able to design, build, name and describe their shapes.

 Here, some students proudly display their design, 

along with their label sheet of how many vertices and faces

each shape had, along with the shape of the base.

 Another assignment had them construct 

three dimensional shapes from a net.

 Can’t quite make this next photo rotate properly.

But with 3D shapes, does it matter the orientation?

What great work this class did.

Even more impressive was their ability to describe

their shape orally using precise mathematical terminology.

Way to go, Miss Powless!!

SMART Sessions with Marion Small

This information was just shared with me. Could be interesting…

Nelson Education has teamed up with SMART Technologies to present a unique series of webinars featuring Marian Small. In each online session, teachers will share SMART Board math lessons and activities they have created, while Marian Small provides practical suggestions on how to easily modify the lessons to make them more accessible for the wide range of learners in the classroom.

Each webinar will focus on a specific strand and will be using examples specifically from Grades 3-6, but anyone is welcome to join from any grade.

Sessions are always on Wednesdays, 4:30-5:30pm (EDT). Each session will be recorded and posted online afterward.

The schedule is:

October 7, 2009: Patterning

November 11, 2009: Number and Operations (Part 1)

January 20, 2010: Number and Operations (Part 2)

March 10, 2010: Measurement

April 28, 2010: Geometry

Registration is now live – you can visit this link, then click the Registration button which will take you to the SMART site. You can register in advance for all 5 sessions.

Caribou Math Contest

Thanks to Alice Anderson for alerting us to this math contest coming up in October (with many more throughout the year). The contest is open to all grade 3, 4, 5, and 6 students across the province. Entry is FREE and the test is done completely on-line, with no further marking or commitment required of the teacher, other than the initial registration.

It would be awesome to see our students participate in this event. I encourage all the classrooms to coordinate their participation and am willing to assist you in any way possible to have our kids compete. I will be around the schools with some posters and signage to generate excitement and interest for the contest. I can also register schools once principals/teachers have expressed their interest.

Here is a quote from the e-mail that Alice shared:

“The sole purpose of the contests is to promote mathematics through puzzle solving among young children. It is not our aim to compare schools as can be seen from the statistics we publish on our web page, which only shows children who won and their school.”

Their website is located here. (Click on “here” for the link). The first contest is for grade 5 and 6 students. The second contest on November 18th is for grades 3 and 4. The contests then alternate throughout the year between the grades, roughly a contest every month (or if you prefer to look at it as a contest for each grade grouping every OTHER month). There is no commitment to do each and every contest, so feel free to look at the site and determine what suits your students.

There are sample problems for students to try in advance of the contest test writing dates, along with other valuable resources. Students who participate will be able to download a printable certificate of participation and a certificate of merit with the achieved rank within their school, within their school board, and in the province.

Let’s take a shot at the Caribou!!!