Archive for March 2010
Painting By the Numbers
I never knew that my experience working on stage crew in the theater would come in handy at ESSDACK, but for the last two days I have been working on a set piece for the By the Numbers podcast. It all started with a shopping trip to Hobby Lobby to find something with numbers to spruce up the look of the podcast.
Jaime, Michelle and I found wonderful metal letters but no numbers and we were getting discouraged when we finally happened upon some wooden numbers. They were about the size we were looking for so we picked out numbers and letters to spell out the title. The next challenge was finding a way to display them. We thought about a folding screen, shelves, or hanging them from the ceiling but none of those ideas thrilled us. We were headed to the front of the store when as luck would have it, we spied a child sized free-standing chalkboard. All of us agreed that this would be perfect for the set as most of the parents in our target audience were from the “chalkboard generation”. At that point we decided to write the title of the podcast on the chalkboard and attach the numbers to the frame.
On our way back to work we discussed that it would be even better if the chalkboard had a magnetic whiteboard on the back so we could turn it over and use it during the podcast as well. Luckily, our resident jack-of-all-trades, Leon Schmidt was in the office and was able to help us make the chalkboard functional as well as decorative.
Over the next two days, I spent several hours painting and decorating the numbers with bright acrylic paints and painting the title on the chalkboard.
Check out our first episodes together……coming soon to My Kids Turn!
Ms. Glovely Strikes Again
Math Snack Logo
Michelle (Ms. Onederful) and I (Ms. Glovely) spent yesterday taping five new episodes of “Math Snacks“, our podcast for elementary math teachers and their students. At the request of an elementary teacher we chose to tape three of the episodes which focused on comparing decimals. The other two were about even and odd numbers.
In our first episode, we used a concrete manipulative, base ten blocks, to examine the area model of comapaing decimals. In the second episode, we switched to a real-life application of decimals by using money (specifically a dollar, dime, and penny) to examine the value model of comparing decimals. Finally, we extended our discussion to examine how adding zeros to the right of the decimal numbers does not change the value of the number. This allows you to compare decimals because all of them would have the same place values and it is like comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges.
In our first episode about even and odd numbers, we determined what makes a number even or odd by using unifix cubes and the saying “Odd Man Out”. Our second episode was about proving the rules about the sums of even and odd numbers.
As always, working on Math Snacks with Michelle, was a fun day. We hadn’t filmed for quite a while but it was easy to slip right back into our Math Snack personalities.