Grateful November 3: Field Trips

We successfully survived our first field trip of the year!

Five classes, twenty chaperones, and 180(ish) excited fifth graders headed to the Henderson Pavillion last week to experience KidsVention.

Prior to the field trip, my students learned about debates, what "pro" and "con" mean, and practiced four debate topics during breakfast.

Careful to steer clear of the current political climate (because it's gotten a bit nasty), the topics were focused on kid-friendly ideas:

1) The United States should end its use of the penny.

2) Students should be required to learn a second language for high school graduation.

3) There should be screen limits for students on school nights.

4) All students participating in sports should earn a trophy.

In class, we talked about how each topic has both pros and cons (because otherwise it'd be a super boring debate).

The kids got clappers at the event, which were promptly confiscated when we got on the bus.  Not to worry, they got them back at the end of the school day.

The event was amazingly well organized, high school students debated with government officials about the four topics, and the whole theme of the event was on the importance of civic responsibility and voting.  

Many of my parent chaperones thanked me for inviting them along.  One described it as a wonderfully safe environment to talk about government because it's been hard to watch the Presidential debates with her children.

After the field trip, our day was devoted to making thank you cards for the chaperones, an empathy lesson from the counselor, and silent reading.

Hooray for field trip days!  

Where was admin?

I had a beautiful conversation erupt during math time today.

Here was the problem:

They were solving with a partial products array (they're not quite ready for traditional or standard algorithms for multiplication) and a very loud, very passionate conversation erupted.  One student argued that having the "zero tens" row in the second factor (409) wasn't necessary.  Another passionately disagreed.  

Soon, I lost the whole class to this beautiful, loud conversation about if zero is a value or simply a place holder.  

Did it need to be represented? 

Could it be skipped? Always?

I reeled them back in after about five minutes of debate, much to the horror of the original instigators who hadn't successfully defended their perspectives.

What a beautiful, natural example of the math practices coming to life.

Now, where was admin?! That would have been a lovely example of math discourse in the classroom for my end of year evaluation.

Voting

Last week, we went to Kid Vention where our students learned about democracy and voting.  

We had our students write debates and share their thoughts in front of the grade level.

We made them ballots:

And classy voting boxes:

They get to vote on the four issues until tomorrow afternoon.  We're going to analyze the data next week and see whose class had the most voters :)

11/01 Update:

Here's our finalized vote:

Not a lot of votes :(
Exactly how we expected.  Should lead to an interesting conversation on Monday about being passionate about issues and actually taking the time out to vote.

Students couldn't vote during learning time.  They had to come before school, stay after or come in at lunch.  We chose to do this because very few adults get time off to vote, we have to take the time out of our day to perform this civic duty.

Debates and KidVention

Today we went to Kid Vention in Henderson for a field trip. 

It was a wonderful experience and I'm so impressed with how our fifth graders did! 

They were polite and respectful listeners.

On Monday, we worked on debates:

Our class had the topic: "Should recess be shortened to allow more time to eat?".  We made a pro's and con's list and students worked in teams to write their arguments.  Each side then picked two speakers to represent their side.

We had a practice debate before today's real one, after our field trip.

I'm proud of how well they did!