May is Math Month

I find this month to be the crunch time at school since lots of curriculum is yet to be covered and students are ready to go play outside. The activities at night make homework hard to accomplish. Teachers have a lot to get through and the track and field days, band concerts and outdoor cleanups are taking more and more time out of a typical spring day. So, I wrote 2 articles suggesting how parents might help teach their child at home the concept of fractions. This can be reinforced many times and will help give the child hands on opportunities to understand fractions. The article is about using an egg carton to teach parts of a whole. Then the child goes on to use measuring cups in a chocolate chip cookie recipe to help measure fractional amounts and then double a recipe. Doubling or tripling a recipe helps to make the child want to understand the concept of multiplying fractions so they don't ruin the cookies! Try these with your child.
Fraction Fun at Home: Modeling Fractions and Multiplying Fractions

Recycled Art Projects - Shoe Sculptures

The Conservation In a Shoebox art show prompted me to assign redesigning shoes to Mr. Shewchuck's class. Don't chuck shoes, reuse! was a message written to the students. I asked them what "footprint" they would leave on the earth. How would they mount the shoes? Would they walk on water, walk the walk, walk on a thin line, walk on a path, follow someone?? Did their shoe shine? Did it shine a light on conservation? Did they "toe" the line? Did they make a stand and stand up for what is right? By posing these questions on the board, the students came up with some pretty creative shoes.
An article written about the project is found at: Recycled Art Project: Shoe Sculptures
The top shoe was called "Flower to Empower" and was made of paper mache with flowers glued all over it. The "Bee Free From Pollution" shoe mounted on a flower was my second pick. Creative and fun project that I took many pictures of and will do again.

Recycled Art Projects - Conservation in a Shoebox

Recently, a student art show prompted me to do conservation based art projects. The projects were for grade 6 - 8 students. They brainstormed what they would like to see in their future in a perfect green world. Then they designed projects to fit in a 12 by 12 by 24 inch high space. The title was "Conservation in a Shoebox". One class had to design shoes. The medium could be clay, paper mache, pop cans, old shoes, cardboard, wire, etc. They had to give a title to the piece, medium used and name. On another index card they had to explain what they were trying to teach the world about conservation.
The project was very creative. Especially because they knew that a few pieces would be chosen for a student art show. Some items the students designed were: pop can shoes, bowls from magazines, recycled worlds (dioramas), pop bottle hats, magazine shopping bags, pop can tops jewellry, wind energy farms, parks, biomes, birds made of seeds, and a hot air balloon as alternate transportation.
The shoes were painted with buttons glued on, paper mached with flowers glued on, molded out of wire, cut out of foam, redesigned by gluing on pop cans, newspapers, and sand.
I wrote 4 articles about the projects. They can be found at Bright Hub. The procedures and pictures are explained in the articles with hints and tips.
How to make robots out of old nuts and bolts: Recycled Robot Project
How to make bowls out of magazines: Recycled Magazine Bowl Project
How to make sculptures from pop cans: Recycled Pop Can Project

Exercise and Learning - A New Science About The Brain and Exercise

A book about exercise and learning called, SPARK: A Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by Dr. Ratey summarizes a lot of research about learning. I wrote an article about the book and then made a 4 step study plan for parents and children. Basically its about using more aerobic exercise in your homework plans for the evening so that the brain is more alert. More will be accomplished. However, it takes changing and committing to the idea of exercise rather than relaxing at night. The article is called: Spark: A New Science of Exercise and the Brain - A Parents Guide to Help Students Study at Home
The book is easy to read and motivating to help people change their ideas about studying. If you do regular aerobic exercise you will already know and feel the benefits of more alert thinking after exercising. The interesting new knowledge is that aerobic exercise actually grows new brain cells! Fascinating.

A Science Project - Tomatosphere

Tomatosphere is a project for grades 2 -11 who want to do some hands-on science and help the Canadian Space Agency. Students who are registered are mailed 2 packages of tomato seeds. One package has been exposed to space conditions such as no gravity and low pressure. The other package is a control package. Students observe and record how long it takes for the seeds to germinate. Teachers enter the results online. At the website at Tomatosphere, there is a lot of information on agriculture in space, space missions, astronauts, Mars and the International Space Station. A very excellent project at an excellent website. This is the second year of involvement at our school for students in grade 2, 4, 5 and 6. Its easy and fun.
I've written an article on the project. It is found at: Tomatosphere: A Simple Space Science Project

Self Esteem for Girls

An email regarding a Dove campaign on girls self esteem, showed an excellent website about hosting a sleepover for girls. The website offered self-esteem programs for adults to show the girls, videos to watch, songs to download, Pj's to purchase, and many other ideas to help discuss issues girls have in this area. Excellent site to show to 8 to 11 year old girls.
Here is the link to the Dove Sleepover for Self-Esteem

Here is the link to the educators part of Dove's website:
Dove Educators Guide
The video I liked on self-esteem is called Evolution. The link to it is here:
Evolution
and there is a good one called Amy at the video section.

There are quizzes and discussion areas at the dove website. You can register for the sleepover and your city is put on the map. You receive 3 free downloads of music for the sleepover.
Overall the site is well organized, easy to follow and great to pass on to friends. I recommend it.

Helping Writers to Write Online Articles

This very useful article helps those who are writing articles online to get right to the point. It helps you to write articles the way a search engine would find them. Online writing is very different than report writing, blogging, twittering, etc. So this article will help you if you are making the endeavour to write articles. Click here: Web Writing: The Ground Rules
The author, The Barefoot, is a writer at Associated Content. He has his own blog and is a helpful writer for anyone who needs things explained.