Place Value City Envelope Foldable

A few weeks ago I attended an amazing workshop held at our regional educational service center. The topic of the workshop was Envelope Graphic Organizers by Dinah Zike. For those of you who do not know about Dinah Zike, let me give you a quick run down. Dinah has been educator for many, many years. She started to implement the idea of using foldables to provide a kinesthetic approach to learning. This idea makes total sense, and I wish that my teachers would have incorporated this while I was in school. Dinah has a new book out covering the idea of re-using envelopes of all sizes to make foldables and graphic organizers. Since I am a huge Dinah fan, I just had to take the workshop held out the ESC.

Many of you know that I have attended several workshops and conferences during this past summer. My goal was to become more familiar and confident in the use of foldables to incorporate them into my teaching. Well...I don't know what I was so worried about! I love foldables, and my kids seem to enjoy them. After attending this conference, I immediately went to Staples and purchased several boxes of envelopes of all different sizes. I knew that it would take a while to get supplies in if I ordered them, and I wanted to show the kids what I learned!

My first objective was to help one particular student. This student is an amazing individual, who has absolutely taken to the idea of using foldables as a learning tool. Knowing that she loves arts and crafts, I was able to create an envelope foldable specific to her learning needs. One of the main topics that we are working on for this year was understanding place values, and being able to add and subtract up to six or seven places. The first thing that I needed to address was understanding the different place values. This is where the workshop that I attended and Pinterest came in handy.

While looking up ideas to help learn place values, I came across this image on Pinterest. It is a foldable  that stands alone, which makes it perfect to sit on a desk or table. Each house has three place values. The green house has a place for the ones, tens, and hundreds. The yellow has a place for thousands, ten-thousands, hundred-thousands. This continues up through the millions and billions. The orange fence holds the decimal place values: tenths, hundredths, and thousandths. It was a perfect starting point for my idea.

https://episd.org/_departments/Ed_media-prt-prod/docs/math_elem/house%20place%20value.jpg

Now, I didn't need to have the billions house or the thousandths place in the fenced area. I modified this "city" to be exactly what I needed. Our city had three houses and two fenced in areas. It was perfect for what we were going to work on, plus it allowed some growth for that student.

Dinah Zike created an envelope foldable that created a workstation that stood up, and had a pocket to hold things. I was thinking that I could create the city to sit on the part of the envelope that stood up. The envelope could hold another smaller envelope that had a bunch of numbers 0-9 inside. There would be enough numbers to create any number that she could think of. We could lay the city down, place the numbers inside of the columns, and the student would be able to identify the place values for each of the numbers. There would also be room to keep any worksheets or other notes that we take in the future to keep everything together. It was portable, colorful, and useful.

Place Value City standing up. This would be the image from the student's viewpoint.

This is the back side or cover of the Place Value City. I even included an
establishment date and a founder just like a regular city would have.

This showcases the use of the numbers inside of the
columns for each place value.
I think this is best part of the city!

The envelope holding the numbers goes inside of the bottom
part of the brown envelope.

 This is one of my favorite projects so far this year. I have reached out to a few of my elementary teaching friends, and they are interested in having their students construct place value cities to help with their understandings of place values. I look forward to seeing how younger students make and use this idea as a learning tool! I hope you enjoyed this idea, and please use in your own classrooms!

My Class Webpage Really Works!!

Wow! Just had a great experience with a couple of my students. Yes, it is after 9:00pm, so it was quite surprising that they were utilizing our class webpage and contact information to reach out to me in order to get the problems for their homework assignment. I have created a class webpage under Google Sites for all of my classes, and I have not been too great about keeping it as updated as I should be. In fact, I wasn't even sure if my students were even looking at it as a resource. It was a nice surprise that they are ACTUALLY taking it into their own hands to figure things out BEFORE class starts tomorrow morning! I am definitely impressed with them. It's going to be a great year with this group of kids!

Chromebook Update

Wow, this year has definitely gone by fast. I just finished putting in my 3 week grades for progress reports, and it only feels like I have been back at school for a week. Even the kids thought math class has gone by quickly! I guess that is a positive response that I am doing something right! :-) Anyway, I thought I would share an update regarding the Samsung Chromebook that I am trying out for the school. The experience has been up and down, to say the least.

Positives

I LOVE THE CHROMEBOOK! It is small, lightweight, and user friendly. I can have it sitting out on my lecture podium so that I can complete our attendance, without having to turn off my Promethean Board. I can have students completing their daily warm-up, using the Promethean Board, while I am taking attendance on the Chromebook.

The Chromebook uses the Google applications, and they have an amazing feature where it AUTOMATICALLY saves periodically. Instead of having to ensure that I am pushing the save button when I am working on something, the program will automatically do this for me.

The variety of Google applications is very extensive. Our school district is looking to implement Google products throughout our classrooms, and I have found a couple of them that work great for myself.

• Google Voice: I set up a different phone number that links directly to my cellphone that I can give out to students for them to contact me in case of emergencies. They don't receive my actual cellphone number, but they can still contact me like it was a cellphone. Plus, when voicemails are left through this phone number, Google Voice will create an email with a transcript of that voicemail and send it to my email. This will be great if I have parent's contacting me, and I look forward to seeing how this feature works out.

• Google Translate: I don't use this feature myself, but I have a teacher that I mentor that has a large number of Spanish Speaking students in her classroom. She is teaching in Pre-K, and these students are unable to read. She does not speak spanish, so I found this application from Google helpful. I recommended that she take a look at it. How it works: The user has the ability to select what languages to translate between. So, as a teacher, we can type in a direction to give a student in English. Select Spanish as the language to translate into, and hit enter. The phrase will be translated to Spanish, and will appear in a separate window. But, since these small kids don't read, there is a great feature to this program. Not only will it convert the phrase into written word, but it can also speak the phrase for you! There is a small speaker looking button that can be pressed, and the computer will say that phrase in Spanish for the teacher! I haven't heard how it has been working for her yet, but she was extremely excited to have another resource to help her students.

Negatives

While I love this little computer, I have had some issues. Well, I might as well get this out, I no longer have the Chromebook. :-( We have sent them back, and I am hoping to receive a replacement soon.

• Power Problems: Three teachers at our school have been demoing the computers, and we have all had a problem with the Chromebook turning on. We don't really know what happened, but there was a few days where the computers would not turn on for us. We would plug them in, and the computer would not take a charge. For myself, the computer would work when it was plugged in, but it wouldn't accept a charge and would turn off once unplugged. For another teacher, her computer wouldn't even turn on when it was plugged in. The battery life of the Chromebook is around 8 hours, which is more than enough to last an entire school day. Remember, we are looking at these for our students. Also, these computers would be plugged in for extended periods of time, so we would need them to work regardless on how long they were plugged in. Not exactly sure if we will receive another Chromebook back. The vendor that we purchased these through said to send everything back, and I am hoping to receive a replacement soon.

• Working Offline: Since we are demoing the Chromebooks for use by a student, I have been attempting to take it everywhere that a student would take. I even took it to a professional development training and a UIL meeting hoping that I could take notes. However, you cannot pull up a Google Doc form to take notes UNLESS you are connected to the internet. The training was not at our school, and they did not have internet available at the location, so I was unable to take notes on the Chromebook. Also, we were having some internet set-up glitches during the time we met for the UIL meeting, and I was unable to take notes then either. I have been researching how to use it offline, but the computers were sent back before I could look into trying some of the things that were mentioned. 

Overall, the Chromebook is a great addition for a teacher. I am still looking on how to implement it into my math classroom for student use, so I'm not totally convinced that it is a great option for the math classroom. However, I love it for teacher use! Hopefully I get a replacement soon!