Representing my famalam
Taking another task from the ATM Cuisenaire material, I asked the children in the class to pick 3 rods; each representing papa bear, mama bear and baby bear from Goldilocks and Three Bears. They were to hide the rods behind their backs and reveal the correct rod for each character as they came up in the story when being read aloud. This was fun. So we then thought about how to represent our own families with the rods. As well as other people outside our family.
Some good estimation and more accurate representations of the rods is happening here. I hope this leads to the children noticing that we can record our play with the rods and keep it for future.
We then listened to this song... (maybe)
https://open.spotify.com/track/6DPrhGVJ1WTZvM9fKptnGe
Representin' ain't easy
I thought I'd try out a task from the Cuisenaire booklet from ATM. It's called sandwiches and the rough proposal to children is to make sandwiches (from the rods) and then ask a friend to find the missing rod from a full sandwich. This proposal was liberally followed by children in my class today. And so was the part of noting the sandwiches made onto paper. Many definitely didn't see the 1 to 1 correspondence in size of squares on paper to the size of the rods. I found this quite surprising. Nevertheless, I think it is a worthwhile step en route to free writing with the rods.
