No More Maths!

We are officially done with our math class, or as they call it here, maths. These past four days of maths have flown by. Today was filled with lots of learning, but also lots of fun. Helen, our teacher, assigned us an investigation simulation with pebbles—which are like M&Ms except not nearly as good. We had to go through making a pictograph, bar graph, strip graph, and pie graph to display our results of the most of the most common color in our package of pebbles. We had to be precise in all our measurements, and be sure to have all the correct parts for each graph. It was kind of annoying because we haven’t been held to that standard in so long, but it was a good reminder of how we’ll have to do precise modeling in our classrooms if we want our students to be precise in their work. One thing that was a bit ridiculous was that Helen made all of us change our graph titles from “Colors of Pebbles” to “Colours of Pebbles.” She said, “I don’t care that you don’t spell it that way in America! You’re in New Zealand now and you have to spell it like we do.” Ha. Hopefully I’ll remember all the different New Zealand spellings when I’m actually in the classrooms helping kids spell!

Another fun part of our day involved lots of newspaper and creativity. Our job was to create an “authentic” New Zealand outfit out of Newspaper and colored paper within the time limit. Our group wanted to be different because we knew everyone was going to do some sort of Maori or Pasifika dress, so I suggested we create a Rugby player. Whitney turned out to be a legit rugby player…especially with the rugby ball I made :) My favorite part was the collar we made for the rugby jersey. I don’t know if the picture does it justice, but it looked good!

One more highlight of the day: after school workout video with Jillian Michaels (one of the trainers on The Biggest Loser). Whitney brought the video with her, so we decided earlier this week all 16 of us were going to do it. Well, we did it! It was hilarious. All of us in our classroom (which is really the gym in the church building) breathing hard, sweating, and laughing at all of Jillian’s funny comments. We plan on doing it at least once a week, maybe more…we’ll see how long we last!