You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.- Sir Ken Robinson

I work with some pretty amazing educators.  These folks inspire me daily to bring my A-game.  I love that sharing ideas is a welcome part of our school culture and I know that it takes a village to educate children.

One of our amazing first grade teachers shared how her students use Book Creator for their math journals.  I was immediately intrigued and of course, we tried it that very day!  It’s no secret how much I love Book Creator, so creating math journals with this versatile app was very exciting.

We have been discussing more and less in math this week.  We have done a variety of hands on activities and have used the stickers in Pic Collage app to show more and less. The children uploaded this to Showbie earlier in the week.  We also used ten frames and cubes to show how many more we would need to make a “ten”.  We talked about which frames showed more and which showed less.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, for our culminating activity we used Book Creator to demonstrate more and less in our new math journals on our iPads.  The students used the same cubes to make 2 piles.  They used the built in camera in Book Creator to take pictures of the two piles and then labeled them more and less.  You could also use dice to show this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first grade teacher used the dice to show addition.  The children took pictures of the dice and then wrote the number sentence.

 

 

With the ability to write and draw in Book Creator, students can use the pen to annotate or show their thinking.  They can also use the recording functionality to tell their thinking if they aren’t able to write.  We will continue to add pages as we work on math skills and at the end of the year, this book can then be emailed to parents.  What a great way to demonstrate growth! It is also a good artifact to be used in parent-teacher conferences throughout the year.

We are excited about our new math journals and look forward to adding to them all  year!

Today we will do exciting new things.  Let’s get to it!