Meadow the Scarecrow has been making the rounds throughout William O. Schaefer Elementary School and Cottage Lane Elementary School classrooms for pumpkin-inspired math lessons!
Meadow, also known as K-5 Instructional Math Coach Shannon Bogart, has designed a variety of fun, hands-on and engaging math lessons for students across grades K-5. “When I plan the lessons, I try to find a topic that is either the students have just finished studying and then create an activity or problem to solve to present it in another way. Or, I find a topic that is coming back around as a way to reintroduce it,” said Bogart. “For example, in Kindergarten, they had just finished patterns so I created a lesson where they looked at a series of photos and had to build patterns from it. This allowed them to look at patterns in another way. For fourth grade, they were coming back to their next multiplication unit, which is their third unit overall for the year, so I created an activity to remind them of the math they learned in unit one that they will now be applying in unit three.”
When Meadow visited WOS teacher Meghan Byrne’s second grade class, students were given a year and they had to find the total number of pounds of the pumpkins on Meadow’s farm. Once students gathered their data, Bogart collected each groups’ totals so the class could see which year had the highest total weight of pumpkins by completing a bar graph.
CLE teacher Jessica Sky’s fourth grade class was responsible for helping Meadow and their friends redesign the layout of their farms. Students were split into six groups and given a list of crops and the area of each item. Based on the square footage of each fruit or vegetable, each student in the group had to use grid paper to draw and cut out an array, which is a table arrangement that represents numbers in the form of columns and rows. After all students in the group cut out their arrays, they had to lay it out on paper to make a model of the farm and identify what each array represented. As an extra challenge, students had to calculate the total area of all of the fruits and vegetables within their farm.