Sage Lally, a student from Blacksburg High School, along with classmate Avery Stolte, filmed and produced a short film using our class. The name of the film is: Alone. Click below and enjoy!
Alone
Alone
Sage Lally, a student from Blacksburg High School, along with classmate Avery Stolte, filmed and produced a short film using our class. The name of the film is: Alone. Click below and enjoy!
Alone
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On April 15, we traveled to the Selu Conservancy in Radford, Virginia, to learn about life in Appalachia during the 1930's. Pre-service teachers from Radford University were on hand to take our children through each room of the farmhouse and teach them using historic artifacts. We learned about the importance of corn for the family and the animals on the farm. The kids were even able to use the machinery to take the kernels off the cob and then grind them into cornmeal. Cornbread muffins anyone? We learned how families entertained themselves without internet and television! We listened to the radio and Mr. Cox played beautiful music for us on the banjo, guitar and fiddle! They even had dolls that connected to the musician's hand by string and danced while they played the guitar. Highly entertaining! The children gained an understanding of how little money families had and how they made their own clothes and toys and grew their own food to get by.
With a lot of help from Miss Tandy next door, we had tons of fun with March Madness in both social studies and math! Below are just some of the activities that we did! Our first lesson had us mapping the teams in the tourney. All 68 teams needed to be located and we listed them on the map of the United States. Kids then chose the school color of the team they picked to go the furthest in the tournament to color each state. Then it was math time. We calculated the probability of a team from each state winning the tournament. We calculated what percentage of states didn't have a team represented in the tournament. We also calculated the percent chance of winning as a team advanced through each round. Then, we took the Sweet 16 teams and used their wins and losses records to calculate their overall winning percentages and their conference winning percentages. Then, each child was assigned a team and we went to the courtyard to arrange ourselves in order from best to worst winning percentages. Kentucky had it easy, 100%! Last, but not least, we took it to the court and calculated our free throw percentages! Students rolled dice to find out how many free throws they would be attempting. They took their shots and made a fraction using the shots they made over the total shots taken. They then converted that fraction into a percentage! Having the kids dive into March Madness helped them apply a lot of our difficult math topics to something relevant!!
Nothing teaches children better than letting them take science into their own hands! We have been studying sound and what better way to demonstrate how it travels than making string phones?!?! Many children had played with string phones in the past but after learning how sound travels, they were now able to understand WHY they work!
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Kelly McPherson:
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