home map travel tales good reads recipes

Friday, September 12, 2014

integrated inquiry: health + math

I was inspired one weekend when my husband set out money for our helper's weekly trip to the grocery store. She has off-the-charts mental math skills, and from the 2000 pesos (about $50), she spends almost every last cent to buy the food she needs to cook our lunches for Tuesday - Friday. (How seriously lucky are we that this something we have in our lives?!) Then I thought: this must go into the classroom. It's the perfect link with our Physical Wellbeing commonality.

So I set it up with the kids, telling them about Angie, and we figured out together how much she probably spends each day. The kids used very intelligent reasoning, saying that some days, when she makes us soup, it probably costs her less than when she makes us chicken with a salad. I mean, come on...! Well done, grade three.

Then we talked about how difficult it is to eat healthy everyday. We talked about advertising and how it's literally all around us, trying to persuade us to buy every sugar-filled and "low fat" and cartoon-laden product out there. From here, we inquired into what makes a balanced meal?

The kids hit the Chromebooks, iPads, and our library, searching for information. After about an hour, we came together and discussed our findings. We even qualified the terms "good" and "bad" with reference to food.

Someone hit on "the five food groups" and we were off...

The next day I shared with them a Google Doc called "The Legends Supermarket," modeled after our class name, that was blank. The kids organized themselves into food group companies, browsed Compfight and CC Search for images of foods, and began adding them to the Doc to create a grocery flyer.



You can see some groups have even started adding in prices...that I've spent some time adjusting today! 10 pesos for a whole chicken? Okay.

After pricing is made more appropriate (!), the kids will use the shared folder to build their own healthy meal for one lunch, with 250 (fake) pesos in their pockets. We've discussed the goal, which is to practice our 2- and 3-digit addition skills



I'm really looking forward to getting back to this next week! Real life, meaningful, and integrated.

Friday, September 5, 2014

critique & feedback

Such an inspiring video:
And aside from critique and feedback, so many other themes:
perseverance
goal-setting
revision
personal best
power of positive language
being specific
building excellence
beginning with the end in mind
...
...
...!