Digital Documentation

I have organized the documentation from our food drive into a digital documentation 'panel'. Maximize your screen for optimal viewing. Enjoy!

Smoothie Day

A reminder that Monday, June 1 is Smoothie Day. Children who are interested in purchasing a smoothie should bring $1.00 and a child size cup.

Saturday Windsor Star

Did you see this in today's paper?

Just How Many?

Each day we had kept track of how many items had been donated to the food drive by our children. We used ten frames to record the totals on a 'running ten frame' sheet. Today I cut out the individual ten frames and spread them on the carpet so the children could appreciate just how generous they had been!

I challenged them to think of strategies for how to easily calculate the sum of these ten frames without counting by ones.

One strategy suggested was to count the full ten frames by ten and then all the 'leftovers' by 1 and add the two groups together. We did that as a group and our total was 331.

Then another suggestion was made for groups of one hundred to be made using the ten frames because "counting by hundreds is faster than tens". We worked to organize the ten frames into the piles of one hundred and put the 'leftovers' in a separate pile.

 

Both strategies resulted in the total of 331 items donated by the children in our class towards the school food drive but we realized that counting by hundreds was much faster than tens in this situation!

Using this background knowledge I asked interested children to apply their learning to the real life situation of counting the total number of items donated by the entire school in the front entrance.

Some children decided to organize food in groups of tens and others used groups of twenty-five.

  

This activity took patience, persistence, and a solid number sense to complete.Way to go!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Mission Accomplished!

Approximately 5000 items were personally delivered by our children this afternoon to the Downtown Mission! Stay tuned for more pictures...

Calculating the final numbers...

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And it keeps growing...

A BIG thank you to Mike and Paul at the Metro on Wyandotte. They have given everything in their donation bins for our food drive and it will be delivered to The Mission tomorrow! Our children's documentation will also be on display at the store.  Stay tuned for pictures...

Getting Ready

Today was a very busy day spent getting ready for our trip to The Downtown Mission tomorrow. We want each child to be able to personally deliver a bag of food when we get off the bus, so we spent time decorating bags with pictures and words showing support.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next job was for each child to choose three items to put in their bag. This way when we do our grand count tomorrow we know exactly how many items we've already bagged. This also proved to be a good exercise in math as the children needed to count the items and then try and fit them together in the bag. They had to choose 'just right' sizes in order to make the items all fit.

 

Our final job was organizing the remaining items so that the boxes weren't overloaded and would be easy to transport tomorrow!

 

Our Supportive Community

A surprise donation waiting for us this morning from Mr. Chauvin! Two cases of cans! Thank you!

Our total count of items coming in today was 95! And we just found out that Bonduelle is donating 4056 cans to our cause! What a wonderful community! Together we are strong! Together we can support those in need! From the bottom of my heart I cannot express my gratitude enough for your support of our amazing children and program!

@McLennan1977

Rolling to 20!

We placed a basket of dice (showing the numbers 1 to 20) and some ten frames out today. 

The children are so clever; they immediately began creating math games to play with these tools. 

"Let's roll and see who gets what number!"

"And then we can put them on the right spot on the ten frame."

Mrs. McLennan: "Where will you put the dice that don't fit on the ten frame?"

"Following the number that it goes behind!"

First to fill their ten frame wins the game!

"I know...we can use two ten frames to play the game. The first one is for 1 to 10 and the second one is for 11 to 20!"

Little Acorns Grow into Mighty Oaks

Your support for our children and the Downtown Mission continues! Thank you! Thank you! We again had a large number of food items arrive to school today with the children.

 

We've been using math strategies from throughout our work this year to help us calculate how many items arrive at school each day. The children know they can count each item one by one, but that also takes a very long time when you are working with big numbers.

 

Today the children wanted to organize the items in groups of 13. They knew that 13 wasn't a 'friendly' number like 5, 10 or even 20 and would be an excellent challenge for us!

 

 

Many of our students mentally calculated the items and our grand total for today was 64! We added this information to our ongoing tally.

It was exciting to bring the food items down to the front of the school...

...and add these to our already huge collection of donations!

 

We were also touched to learn that Mr. Roger Chauvin at the Windsor Essex County Canoe Club was working with his members to raise money for The Mission. We wrote an email to him sharing what we were doing in our classroom. Our children were amazed at the number of people in our community that wanted to help. Mr. Chauvin wrote an email right back to us. 

What a wonderful message of support to show our children that their work is touching people in positive ways and changing their community for the better. We wrote back to Mr. Chauvin. 

Our children are growing into those mighty oaks of which Mr. Chauvin spoke so eloquently. We are so privileged to be a witness to this.