Hands-On Math (By the Whole Class)

Lauren: We learn a lot about math by doing Work Places, which are math centers. For our math lesson, we even got to use candy to collect data and then graph which color showed up the most.

Catalina: I played the game called "25 Cents or Bust". This game teaches us how to count money, and the winner has to get as close to 25 cents  as he or she can without going over.

Matthew: We use the scale to see how much things weigh. We chose to weigh the giant red ball, and it weighed the same as 86 ceramic tiles!

Pablo: In the video I helped Emilo on the Smart Board so that he could figure out how to do double-digit addition with a Tic-Tac-Toe game.

Natalie: In the Treasure Game, that the girls were playing, we learn how to do double-digit subtraction.

Rocket Launch:Connecting Math with Real-Life Learning (By A.J.)

  On January 23rd my dad came to school and did an experiment with all the class. It was a rocket that went really high, and it worked with a chemical reaction. It had vinegar (an acid) and baking soda (a base) and when they’re put together it made a gas, and that gas made the rocket go up. Our class knows this from other experiments: Eduardo did this reaction with a balloon, Natalie made a volcano, and Pablo did an underwater volcano.
Watching the launch was super exciting! We used two kinds of altitude trackers (one from NASA and the other was homemade) and these were used for measuring the angle that the rocket went up (we’re learning about right angles, right now). After that we used an altitude calculator to figure out how high the rocket went, and we found out that it went almost 9 meters high. That is the length of our classroom!
On the last launch it was funny because my Dad’s hand got sweaty, from being nervous, and it stuck on the top of the rocket. This made the rocket spin, so our launch failed; but, not really, because failures teach us how to do a better job the next time. See the videos below to learn more!

How to make this kind of rocket: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3FlJZySyzM

Early US rocket failures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLn0_ABKvxY&feature=related

A Balloon Experiment (By E.B.)