What is the flipped classroom? It's a new method of teaching that many educators are swearing by. In this teaching model, the teacher provides the objectives and the learning tools and the students work together to learn the process. The group meets at the end of the lesson to discuss the process and the teacher teaches, reviews, corrects or guides the students as they correct their mistakes. This method also allows teachers to create and facilitate project-based learning opportunities as less classroom time is spent on traditional teaching of material.

The traditional flipped classroom students learn the concepts for homework and complete activities in class. This method is recommended for middle school and older. For our young students, I have modified the traditional to allow for the learning to happen in school. 

I have slowly been introducing this method to the students using posters, handouts, and pages I created in this blog. See the new category called Math Flipped Classroom for more information on some of the lessons. While the students are working on their flipped lessons, I am able to call them in small groups or alone to help them understand more difficult concepts. What I find is that the children are engaged in their classwork, more successful working with partners, and are strengthening their deep level thinking skills. When we get together in group, they are more easily able to explain their own thinking and how they discovered the process. They are also more able to self-correct since they own the process; it has not been taught to them.

You can read more about the flipped classroom here.

     1. http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/

     2. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/flipped-classroom-in-class-version-jennifer-gonzalez

Saturday, March 14 was National Pi Day. This year's Pi Day was especially significant as the date corresponded to the first five digits; an event that occurs only once in each millennium.

We celebrated Pi Day today, March 16. We measured different circles to derive Pi ourselves. We got pretty close to 3.14 in our measurements! Then we examined the first 100 digit of Pi and created paper chains. Each color in the chain corresponds to a different digit.

See highlights of our day below.

We just learned that square numbers create square arrays! We have used blocks and graph paper to visually represent square numbers. 

From these activities, we derived that a square number is any number times itself and a square root is the factor used to create the square number.