Multiplication Activities

I was recently reading a blog that shared ideas for teaching multiplication to older students. It can easily become boring and repetitive for both the students and teachers to continually rehash the same activities and resources, so I was pleased to see this blog had a lot of original ideas.
I also thought that they seemed like good activities to send instructions home for parents to play with their children to help them practice.

Writing

Today I started a writing project following the approach I saw at St Anthony's last week.

This included using a visual plan for the text and exclusive use of WALTs.

I felt the clear structure will be very helpful for the students to understand what their work will look like when it's finished.

ANZAC Biscuits

Yesterday we read ANZAC Biscuits in a school journal from 2007.

It provided some very interesting background around the history of ANZAC biscuits.

The origins are unclear, maybe some variation on Scottish oatcakes or maybe something made by the soldiers in the trenches. But we know they were baked in New Zealand and sent to the soldiers in care packages.

Christopher then spent some time making the biscuits, independently.

This was an interesting activity and he learned the importance of accurately measuring all ingredients and ensuring you have the correct measuring cup!

The biscuits turned out very well.

ANZAC Art

We have started our ANZAC unit with a piece of poppy art. We were learning about perspective and how to use this in our artwork.

Christopher was able to provide both the learning intention and the success criteria for this wall display.

The art was created by doing a tempera wash for the sky, painting the red poppies on (using our knowledge of perspective), using oil pastels for the grass and flowers in between then adding black dots for the middle of the poppies.

I like how the process was very prescriptive yet all of the pieces are different.