The students had great enthusiasm again today in Numbers Big & Small.  We started the day playing the place value game “Make It, Say It.”  The game involves using a set of 10 cards numbered 0-9 (only 1 of each digit in the deck) and then 20 various clue cards.  The students had to read the clues to figure out what the number was.  Examples of clue cards were:  “Make the smallest odd six-digit number,” or  “Make the largest five-digit multiple of 10 with a 3 in the ten thousands place,” or “Make the number that is closest to ½ of 1,000.”

The class created a room-length number line from 0-9,000, and marked off each thousand.  Then we chose worldwide destinations and went to the computer lab to research their distances from Vanderbilt.  There were many ideas, including our homes in Nashville, the bridge in Sydney, Australia, Big Ben in London, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The students calculated their distances from Vanderbilt University in miles and kilometers. Then, the students located their places on a map and drew representations of the destinations on notecards, noting the sites and distances from Vanderbilt.  We placed the notecards in order on our number line.  And, the class calculated the difference between the closest and farthest away.  This was our own version of the Amazing Race.

We read Your Place in the Universe by Jason Chin, which discusses comparative size, scale, and distance. “Most eight-year-olds are about five times as tall as this book… but only half as tall as an ostrich, which is half as tall as a giraffe… twenty times smaller than a California Redwood! How do they compare to the tallest buildings? To Mt. Everest? To stars, galaxy clusters, and . . . the universe?”  At the end of today, one student commented that we have studied BIG numbers, but we haven’t studied SMALL numbers yet.  (I acknowledged that he was correct and we would be switching later in the week.)

At the end of the day, the students understood and played the Five Crowns card game.  It’s a rummy-style game with 5 suits: spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds, and stars.  The students looked for books (3 or more cards of the same rank, like three 7s in different suits) and runs (sequence of 3 or more consecutive cards of the same suit) and tried to make sets with their cards.  There are jokers and rotating wild cards as well as a different number of cards for each hand.  (The game begins with 3 cards in the round, so 3s are wild; the next round has 4 cards, so 4s are wild…..) At the end of each round, the players must add up the cards still left in their hands (that didn’t make it into a set). The winner has the lowest score at the end. They did a great job with the game!

Dinner table questions:

We look forward to tomorrow!
Warmly,

Ms. Elizabeth Ms. Madden