Shopping for school

One of the things I enjoy about being in Australia is the shopping. No-one looking over your shoulder every minute you are in the shop. Wandering in wide aisles, in air-conditioned comfort. Spotting bargains. The challenge is that I've only got 30kg of checked baggage and 7kg carryon to get it all back to Cambodia. This year I've been blessed with a couple of gifts of money to buy things for my students, and I'm really appreciative of those gifts. Here's some of the goodies I'll be taking back with me.

Slightly smaller than our existing sets, this set will be perfect for lower grades when I add a few more ones cubes to it.

Ones cubes are tiny, and so they get lost easily. Also we only had one hundred in each set which isn't quite enough for individual students to work with them. Now I've got an extra hundred tens (longs) and an extra two thousand ones so I'll be able to make our existing sets much more user friendly. Just need to remind teachers how hard it is to get these so they make sure students are careful to put all the pieces away carefully.

Aldi had these excellent non-fiction books on sale for just $2.49 (RRP $14.99) and I stocked up my sticker supply as well. These were just $2 per packet with either 240 or 384 stickers in each. 

 A big thank you to those who helped me buy these things. There's more in Brisbane to pack, but I'm hopeful it will all fit within my luggage allowance.

Look what I found today!

Even in Phnom Penh, there are a couple of places that I kind of enjoy shopping. Today I visited one, looking for a way to organise my resources for our math program, and also to possibly replace something I broke earlier in the day.  Well, I didn't find either in the first place I looked, but look what I did find.

Front view

Back view with beads flipped over.

When I spotted the first one, I thought about it for a minute and then checked the price. They were just $2 each. They only had five, so I decided to buy all their stock. I was glad I did, because a couple of them were either missing a bead or had an extra one. It was an easy process to move the beads so that I end up with four complete ones and then I also moved the columns with missing beads to the 10,000,000 and 100,000,000 places (which I may just remove anyway as we don't go past 1,000,000 in 4th grade) so even the fifth one is usable. I've got 4 tables in my classroom, so that's one per table and one to spare!

Now why am I so excited about this. Well, one of the tools that is used in our math program to help students understand larger numbers is the abacus. There's a printed version and students practice reading and writing four and five digit numbers using the abacus.

The next step from simply reading the number is telling what the number would be if a single bead is added to a particular place. Some of my students in the past have really struggled with this, especially when it comes to adding that tenth bead to a column which requires regrouping. When I spotted these little treasures, I thought, "That's just what I need for those students who need hands on practice".

Now if you look closely you'll notice there's a lot of writing on the front side. Some of it is Chinese characters (like the ones you can still see at the base of each column) and there was also a "Multiplication Table". Since I do occasionally get students who can read Chinese, and also the Multiplication Table would be distracting, I found a piece of coloured "contact" and covered it up. It was a bit fiddly, but all the loops come out and I managed to do it without losing any beads.

I'm still working out what to do with the base, but I know I've got some sticky spots somewhere that I can write the English letters on for represent each of the places that we will use. Now I'm looking forward to using them with my kids when school goes back.

Background writing covered with "contact".

Tenths and Hundredths and Pony Beads

So what do pony beads have to do with tenths and hundredths. Read on and you will find out.

In Grade 4K we've been learning about fractions. Over the years I've discovered that either they get it or they don't. Unfortunately, we use fractions every day, so kids do really need to get it. Over the last couple of weeks we've done a fair bit of work with ordinary fractions, and putting them on a number line, and comparing them. After Friday's test I know we need to do a bit more work on equivalent fractions, but this week, we are working on linking common fractions and decimals.

This week we've been working on tenths and on Thursday we started on hundredths. The first two days went OK, using number lines and linking common fractions with decimal fractions (i.e. 1/10 = 0.1 and 3/10 = 0.3 etc.). Then we started working on hundredths. They seemed to do OK with the lesson on Thursday, and everyone was able to complete the workbook activity, which had them colouring tenths and hundredths on a grid and then writing the fraction in hundredths.

So Friday morning before I went onto the new content, I asked them to tell what we'd be learning about. Responses were vague. Eventually I got that we'd been learning about tenths and hundredths, but to get the relationship between the two was almost impossible. So it was time to get out my new teaching aid.

Kids love hands on things, and these strings of pony beads are great for helping kids understand tenths and hundredths.

There are ten beads of one colour in a set, and ten sets of beads on a string, making 100 beads. They can be really useful for students in lower grades who are beginning to learn what 100 is, and they are great for 4th graders struggling to understand how tenths and hundredths fit together. I'd already modelled the concept using a square divided into 100 smaller squares, and the kids had done some work with that, but getting these out (and everyone got to "play" with their own), really helped them see. Each single bead was one hundredth of the whole string, and ten hundredth beads went together to make one tenth!

We'll see how much they remember on Monday!

P.S. A big thank you to Mary Kluck and Lesley Kimber for getting me the supplies to create these great teaching aids, and to Janet Singer for giving me a sample and showing me some ways to use them.