Newsletter: Friday, May 3

Dear Families,

This week we have been doing the work of mathematicians in many different forms and as part of many different curricular structures. First, we launched a mini-unit into where our food comes from. You might have noticed earlier in the week the kids came home collecting the names and places of origin of your fruits and vegetables. We found that our produce comes from all over the country and even the world. The domestic products were...

Potato – Idaho

Potato – North Dakota
Green Peas – Texas
Grapes – California
Oranges – Florida
Oranges - California
Corn – Tennessee
Apples – Washington (state)
Strawberries – California
Strawberries – South Carolina

Strawberries – Florida

Strawberries – Arkansas
Spinach – Florida
Carrots – Florida
Carrots - California
Blueberries – Florida
Blueberries – California
Lettuce – California
Black-eyed Peas - Indiana

The  products coming from other countries originated in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Costa Rice, Guatemala, New Zealand, Canada, and Chile.

The kids took this information and began mapping each product, its country of origin, and its direct path to their stomachs here in Columbia, South Carolina. This presented a great opportunity to grab a set of atlases and look at political maps showing the states of the US as well as the countries of the world. I've found over the years that kids generally love maps. I do too. It's so cool to see all those different places spread across the page and locate our space among it all. We found that most of our international produce was coming from Central America and South America. However, one family had bananas that had traveled all the way from New Zealand. We used an internet resource to find out the approximate distances each of these foods traveled. It was many, many thousands of miles. Among all our produce, very little came from our home state. Soon we'll begin to discuss why this might be. 

As we have been doing this work we have learned or reviewed how to read maps, read numbers into the thousands, and round numbers to the nearest hundred. I hoped to take the kids to City Roots Farm and the State Farmer's Market as a part of this study. However, I think we'll wait until next fall to do so as we continue this study in relation to our third grade inquiry into plants.

 

In other math-related work, we also read a book titled The King's Chessboard. This is the story of a king who insists one of his servants request a payment of some sort for a service he has performed for the king. Though the servant urges the king to forget about payment of any sort he is finally badgered into naming something. So he tells the king he would like to receive rice for as many days as there are squares on the chessboard. However, he wants one grain on the first day, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on. Each day his rice is doubled from the day before. After reading this book we created a table to do this same work. Each day we add another day or two to the total. We are now up to day number twenty-seven. On Day 27 the servant would receive 67,108,864 grains of rice. With many, many more days to go it is obvious this number is going to get really big. We'll soon have to do some research to find out how to read these numbers. This daily doubling is not only fun but also fits within our current study of multiplication. We've been playing games to help us see that multiplication is another way of looking at problems that require equal sets, or repeated addition.

We've also been working to collect data and analyze it. We walked down to the Scholastic Book Fair and, using the illustrations on the covers of the books, studied the texts being offered to see how diverse they were. We found out they weren't diverse at all. Of the more than 400 books we tallied we found that....

48% were about White characters
45% were about animals
6% were about African American characters
less than 1% were about either Asian American or Native American characters

And no other groups we could identify were represented in any way. I asked who might want to know this information. A few people responded that kids who wanted to read books that had characters like themselves would. 

A few weeks ago I shared an article from the NY Times from author Walter Dean Myers in which he wrote about growing up as a Black child who found it almost impossible to find texts that reflected his family or neighborhood and feeling a certain disconnect because of this. After hearing this we took 20 minutes to quickly study our classroom library to see what sorts of chapter books I was offering the kids. Even though this is the sort of thing I think about quite often, our classroom library was not as reflective of the kids in our classroom as I would have hoped. In fact, it wasn't much better than the Scholastic Book Fair. We want to make sure every kid in our class and school has many opportunities to use literature as both a mirror to reflect what they see and experience in their own lives as well as a window to look into the lives of those who are different than them. Building a strong class library is part of this process. Asking that companies such as Scholastic (who is often the source of most classroom and home books) keep this in mind and make many diverse titles, authors, and characters available is something we can do to make a difference. Next week the kids will think of someone who might want to know what we found (book publishers, librarians, teachers, etc) and write them letters.

This past week we have also been studying picture books in writing workshop and perspective in our reading workshop. I'll tell more about each of these in next week's newsletter.

Have a great weekend,
Chris