Gratitude is the Thing

November is the month where we talk about gratitude. We've got Veterans Day and Thanksgiving - both holidays that are not only acknowledged but celebrated in our public schools. For our enrichment lab, I wanted to further the dialogue about gratitude so I suggest to my supervising teacher that we do a letter writing project to our armed forces. I did some research and found out about Operation Gratitude, which sends gift boxes to the Armed Forces. Each box includes a personal letter of thanks. This was the perfect organization for us to go though to conduct a writing assignment that would be true service learning. I found some leveled letter templates at Teachers Pay Teachers that worked for this project and the kids got to work:

I introduced each lesson with vocabulary:

1. Gratitude - what in the word is that? The attitude of being thankful! Many students did not know this word going into the lesson. Students then shared with one another something they were thankful for. 

2. Armed Forces - who are they? What do they do? We briefly discussed the different branches of the military and also discussed the difference between active duty, the reserves and veterans. 

We watched a short video of soldiers talking about what it is like to not receive correspondence from home and how much children's letters mean to them. 

Then, with leveled guidance depending on the grade (kindergarten & 1st grades copied an example whereas 2nd-5th grade wrote their own letters), the students composed letters that thanked our Armed Forces and also shared information about themselves. They worked so diligently and in some classes you could have heard a pin drop the students were so very focused. I was proud of their dedication to the project. 

Another component was that we also made holiday cards to go to wounded military who will be in the hospital during the holiday season. The pictures and messages of the cards were so heartfelt! In all, the school composed over 600 cards and letters to send out to our Armed Forces. I was incredibly proud of their work and dedication and thrilled that we could lead a project like this! 

Tangram Puzzle - 2nd Grade Math

This semester, I am taking Math Methods as part of my Teacher Education program at Fort Hays State University. Earlier in the semester, I taught a mini lesson during my math internship class to a group of excited 2nd graders. The kids loved the lesson and I learned a great deal about the power of modeling when teaching a hands on concept. 

The lesson was an introduction to the 2nd grade geometry unit. 2nd graders need to be able to, "Recognize and draw shapes having specified attributes, such as a given number of angles or a given number of equal faces. Identify triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons, and cubes," (Kansas Common Core Standards for Mathematics). So, my lesson objective was to have the students be able to reassemble the tangram puzzle,  organize the tangrams by similar shape, create larger triangles from the tangrams and assemble a square from 2 or more tangrams, receiving at least 8 out of 12 points. To do this, the students were given 6"x 6" pieces of construction paper and then I walked them through the process of making their own tangram puzzle. 

As the students worked on their tangrams, I asked them questions about the shapes like, "Which shapes are similar?" and "Can you create a larger triangle using smaller pieces?" 

The students completed this lesson during math stations, so each group I worked with was about 4-5 students. At another station, the students read the book Grandfather Tang's Story by Ann Tompert. This book is about tangrams and partnered nicely with the tangrams activity. 

A few weeks later, the students began their geometry unit that is part of their regular curriculum. The tangram activity was a nice introduction and allowed the students to think about the relationships between shapes.