Learning About Money

I always joke about my kiddos "hijacking" my lessons when they take us on a learning journey of their own, but secretly I love it, because the lessons are always richer, and they are always engaged.  It is real world learning at its best.  It happened again this week when one of my kiddos asked if he could share some foreign coins with the class that his uncle had given him. Of course, I said ok, and away we went.

We started passing the coins around and the students began making observations about where they were from and what they looked like.  One of them remarked that one of them looked like a Mexican peso.

This coin was from Uruguay.  They noticed that one of the coins was made in 1975  - I told them the coin was as old as their teacher because I too was made in 1975!  They were pretty impressed with that.  Then one of the students pulled out his ipod and I couldn't take it away because he was researching Chinese coins to see what they looked like.

Another student noticed that their was a French coin called a Franc.  He said, "Mrs. Malloy, my cousin told me that they use Euros in France, why is this a Franc?"  I told him that they did use Euros, but it was only just recently.  In Europe they decided to adopt currency that could be used in several countries because they are very close together.  I told them that it might be like having to trade money when we went from Nevada (where we live) to California (only 50 miles from here).  I couldn't remember the exact year that they started using Euros so we researched it.

As we read the article, some of them said, 1995, some said 1999, and some said 2002.  What a great tie-in with state testing coming up - let's do some close reading to figure out who is right.

We found out that the Euro was named in 1985.  It was introduced in 1999.  In 2002 it surpassed the US dollar in value.  A super fun day of learning!

We wrapped it up by playing my Missing Money Problem Solving Center.

I wish the kids would take over lesson planning sometimes! LOL!

Who Knew That a Little Worm Could Bring About So Much Learning??

Today was one of those days when you have a perfectly good lesson plan written, and suddenly a great teaching moment lands in your lap, so you scrap your lesson plans and watch the students soar as learners.
One of my students came in with his mom and a jar with what looked like a bunch of leaves in it.  She told me that they had found this horn worm on their tomato plants, and decided to bring it in to share with the class.

I planned on just having the student share his little "friend" during our sharing portion of our morning meeting, but I would have never guessed that my students would be so intrigued!  They started asking a billion and one questions and even asked if we could do some research about the horn worm (which has a horn at it's bottom that gives it its name - we had quite the discussion deciding whether it was its head or its bottom, but when it started eating we knew the answer).

The students spent some time writing down their observations and questions.

Then they decided to do some research on the computers about the tomato horn worm.  They checked out these two sites:  VegEdge and Wikipedia.  They also loved watching this video on youtube.




We talked about how gardeners might not like these worms on their plants as much as we liked learning about them.

It was amazing how many different ways the students responded to the hornworm in our classroom.  Some of them approached their learning as artists, drawing pictures of the hornworm.

Some of the students responded as scientists formulating a list of questions they could discover and research.

This little guy lying on the carpet saw me with the camera and said, "Quick! Mrs. Malloy has the camera! Camouflage - blend in like the worm!"

We wrapped up our fun-filled learning day by writing thank you letters to the student and his mom for bringing in the horn worm for us to learn about!

All in all, this was one of my best teaching days ever- the kids were completely engaged from morning until afternoon (we actually worked past the bell and had to scramble to leave!).  One of my older boys came into my class this day because he left his lunch at home and commented about how busy all of the students were.  "It was a whirlwind of activity!" he said.

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