Here are some more of our white boards in the last few months.

After NodeBots, which used a double elimination bracket, but before the Olympics, I taught the kids about tournament brackets. Here are some of their friends, facing off in a coin toss. Congratulations, Brett.

a double elimination bracket, showing names of kids

For Sports Week, we watched clips of the Olympics. The very first gymnastics vault they saw was where the French athlete vaulted and broke his leg. 90 degree angle in his shin. The kids didn’t understand what happened; they didn’t know at a glance where arms and legs should and shouldn’t bend.

Peter thought vaulting was awesome. He loves to be turned upside down and thrown, maybe he’ll like gymnastics. Which is a good sport for short boys. Except that gymnasts break their legs in nasty ways.

Here are some vocab words for the kids to read. Heidi had the left side, Peter the right.

names of sports on the white board

This was Bryan’s. Peter likes chess, stereotypically.

chess notation

This was also Bryan’s. The family became smaller and smaller to learn what numbers are between the counting numbers. Heidi struggled with this because she chose to be the ladybug and then I chose to be the butterfly and she was extremely jealous. number line being zoomed in and in

Here’s a lesson on squares and square roots. on the left side, there is 1x1=1^2=1, all the way up to 5x5=5^2=25. Then there are square grids showing each of those, and then on the right is the square root of every number. Some are nicer than others.

Heidi filled in all the blanks correctly. 1^2=1, square root of 1=1, continued up to 5. Some are erased and Heidi is filling in the erased numbers.

5x5 grid, with a square drawn over it with an area of 9, 10, 16, 25.

I got obsessed with the app Sumaze, which is so fun. I was going through the levels with Heidi and Peter, and I was trying to explain why a negative times a positive is a negative. They know that a positive minus a larger number is a hole, and that 2 holes 3 boxes deep filled up 6 boxes of dirt (which we gave away, and that’s why it’s negative). But what does a negative pile of holes look like?

This is the best I could do. It’s a bunny that loves to go to the garden. It’s starts out in his burrow, and always hops to the garden. Except when it sees a negative sign, and then it has to turn around and go to the mean dog. Unless it sees two negative signs, then it can turn around twice and go to the garden again.

It can take 2 hops 3 times, or 1 hop six times… you get it.

the bunny setup

But 8’s are hard. peter doing a negative multiplication problem correctly, except he wrote infinity instead of 8. heidi pointing at her correct answer as well

sentences with each part of speech labeled

Which is all true. How do you get boys to poop in the potty? He just stopped pooping.

list of alternate forms of 1 and 0

Heidi and Peter are showing you which problems they completed.

Heidi and peter showing the color of marker which corresponds to the problem they solved correctly

In a lesson on absolute vs. relative directions, I stapled bracelets around their wrists which told them which was the left and the right. I taped papers to the wall saying north, south, east and west. Showing that some directions change based on where you face, and some don’t.

heidi and peter with left and right bracelets

Peter gets all of his lefts and rights wrong. I know he knows which is which because he gets literally 100% of my questions wrong. If he didn’t know, it would be like 45% wrong or something. I hope he doesn’t play this game when he goes to school.

page with girly objects on it, pearls, hair clip, brush, etc, with the words written by an adult and then copied by a child This is how I get Heidi to practice spelling and handwriting. Also by using girly colors of markers to trace over. She doesn’t naturally take to spelling, and I smell a weakness she’ll struggle with in school.

I also smell a weakness in Peter for word problems. He is stuck on them in Khan Academy. The boy just started to read Mo Willems, so I’ll give him a break for a while. I was always good at word problems, and judged kids who weren’t. I’d think to myself, just read the words, think about it, understand it, and then do it! So if you have struggled with word problems and have some tips on how to help me help Peter, he would appreciate it.