Note: This entry was written February 24, 2010 but was not published until March 21, 2010.

Wow, I didn't expect such quick replies to my blog posts during this week of frantic updatiing (I know my last post was rife with spelling and grammatical errors, I had posted right before I went to bed last night and was planning on going back and correcting it, but as soon as I arrived home today to fix it, I had already received feedback!), but thank you Dr. White and Heather, I'll have to make sure and comment on your blogs as well!

Today I was going to talk more about the more active/hands on class projects, specifically, the 100th Day of School project I helped my 1st grade master teacher with. For the 100th day of school we planned a "counting to 100" (as well as sorting and graphing) project for the students, using Froot Loops. We gave each student baggies of Froot Loops, and instructed them to count out 100 Froot Loops. This is were we encountered our first problem.: the students, while counting their Froot Loops, either silently or aloud, would constantly loose track of their count, and return to zero. We quickly found a remedy for this by showing/modeling for the students how to organize their Fruit Loops into piles of 10s (10 being a short and simple number most pre-K students can count to) and once they had made 10 piles of 10 they would have counted out 100 Froot Loops (we had already gone over counting by 10s up to 100, this aided in reinforcing this lesson).

Once every student had successfully counted out 100 Froot Loops, we instructed them to save the rest of their Froot Loops in the baggie for later and we passed out a graph sheet labeled with "red", "orange", "yellow", "green", "blue", and "purple" (all of the Froot Loop colors) and asked the students to now sort their 100 Froot Loops by color. During this process Froot Loops would be spilled to the floor, steped on, grabbed by other students, and of course, eaten (all of which we instructed the students NOT to do before the project)! The classroom was hectic and highly active but the students were enjoying the activity with sorting practice.

As soon as each student had sorted out their Froot Loop by color, we instructed them to count how much of each color Froot Loop they had and write the number next to the name of each color on the graph paper worksheet (we aided the students who did not know their color words by asking them to say the color names slowly "p-p-purple starts with 'p'! Which word on the sheet also has a 'p'?... good! Write the number of p-p-purple Froot Loops in the blank space by the word that starts with the 'p'." Not only were we teaching mathematic skills but language skills as well.

When each student had recorded their Froot Loop count data on their graph worksheets we showed them how to count out the same number of blocks by each color name and the number they wrote to create a graph. When the graphs were complete we asked the students to raise their hands to asked the students who had the most of each color (purple), who had the least of each color (yellow) and why was one color more found than other colors ('because yellow is light and purple is dark and when the other colors mix, purple gets made a lot because when too many color mix it get dark', a good answer)! We continued to discussed why graphing is important (for voting, for tracking grades, to see who won a contest) and how we can use/read graphs to see how information is easily found and organized.

It was a busy, messy, stressful project, but it helped the students understand a new concept in a fun and memorable way, as well as in a way they can relate to. It is hard for teachers be mentally and physically prepped for projects such as these but it is all in benifet for the students we teach and well worth the effort put in to see them walk away with new knowledge and expanded vision of the world around them.