What a week! START guided us in investigating layers of the rain forest. Then we made rain forest rain sticks and performed a song about the layers using them.
START
Exploring the Savanna with START
Our investigation of animals and habitats continued into the savanna, with fantastic activities involving food chains and food webs that got us thinking more deeply.
START Week 1: Overview of Habitats
The Return of START!
Can you guess what the new START topic is? We are so excited to welcome three volunteers from the Dartmouth HOP Center for the next six weeks. They will be enriching one of our curriculum areas by infusing it with the arts, and you won’t believe all the wondrous tales (tails?) your child will be bringing home! Each week these ingenious scholars will be trotting over to MVCS to spend an hour with us. Check out more information about the START program here.
***Meet CAITLIN! Caitlin is a sophomore trying to decide among medicine, biology, or math for her major, for who could resist those three intriguing topics? She lives in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C., and she just loves all the museums in that area. Her top museum is the Natural History Museum. Do those of you who have traveled that way agree? Talk to her! A fun fact about Caitlin is that she enjoys painting and drawing a great deal, and her favorite animal is the giraffe.
***Meet JESSICA! Jessica enjoys her home town of Cleveland, Ohio, for its welcoming mix of rural and urban delights. A fun fact about her is that she has very bendy fingers, and she already heard that she has some bendy kindred spirits in our class this year. She is a dancer, enjoying all kinds of dancing such as ballet, tap, and jazz. Her favorite animals are cats, especially her pet cat, which weighs over twenty pounds.
***Meet NOELLE! Noelle is a junior from Boston. She especially enjoys the city’s restaurants, and of course, the Red Sox! She is a psychology major with an education minor. Her favorite animals are marine animals, especially sharks.
Great Adventures in Math Starring START!
START Symmetry Exploration
Playing the Mirror Game to review symmetry.
Learning new vocabulary such as axis as we take on the challenge of designing our names with line symmetry. Can you flip it exactly? Can you even flip your color pattern?
Geometry Galore!
Oh, the vocabulary! Oh, the teamwork! START offered up so many geometry challenges, and we tackled them all!
A very long triangular prism
A two-person sphere
Can we create a three-D shape?
Our individual 3-D rectangular prisms created a whole class 2-D feet circle!
Musical Math
Have you noticed math in the music you love? Thanks to our amazing START volunteers, we are noticing more and more musical math patterns.
We got to experience an instrument most of us have never seen up close. Comment if you know what it is!
We tried out all sorts of patterns with quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, and eighth notes. The third graders made some fabulous connections with our current fraction unit.
START coordinator Mary Gaetz was visiting and commented that our class “is fearless, plunging enthusiastically into new learning!” What a compliment! For many, parts of the note reading activities were new and challenging, and it was so encouraging to hear that we are living out our growth mindset strategies in visible ways!
Each group had the opportunity to write their own song and perform it with all sorts of instruments!
As we joke every day, “Math is everywhere!”
Patterns!
What a kickoff! Our marvelous START volunteers gave us so much to think about with their integrated lesson on patterns this week. Alexandra, Steffi, and Amanda tied numbers to movements we chose so we could combine the numbers in a variety of crazy patterns. Small groups designed their own rhythms and sounds to layer patterns together. We even got to know each other better using math vocabulary.
Introducing our Spring START Volunteers!
Math is everywhere, and our three new START volunteers are full of ideas for enhancing our study of math with the arts. Notice they made a pyramid to give you a sneak peek, and we can’t wait to see what happens with patterns, symmetry, and shapes over the next six weeks!
Steffi (top of pyramid) is a junior from Connecticut. In her major of human geography and public policy, she ties math and art together with cartography. An example of one of her maps is locating food deserts in a city by mapping the supermarkets. She might map things such as where health care centers are located to be sure people have access to care or how far it is for people in a certain rural area to get to stores. She gets excited about using her field of expertise to help people. Steffi gave the NY Times “Upshot” as an example of the type of mapping she works on.
Amanda (right) is a junior from Connecticut as well. She majors in economies and quantitative social sciences and applied statistics. One of the aspects of math that gets her excited is using lots of data to understand the world. An example of her work might be studying how people interact and how friendships might affect depression. She also uses math as she plays saxophone in the Dartmouth Jazz Band.
Alexandra (left) is a freshman from New York. She is pre-med and has always loved math. A teacher who used socratic style instruction in high school really sparked her interest. She also uses her math skills to sing in a Christian a cappella group on campus.