Activities! Earth Day—Hooray! And MORE!
The Stuart J. Murphy Activities Newsletter comes out every other Wednesday, filled with selections from a vast and wonderful archive of Early Math & Early Childhood Ed activities.
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Hello Everybody!
It’s Earth Day! Hooray! I like Earth Day so much, the Wednesday Activities newsletter is coming out a day early! I like Earth Day so much, I wrote a Mathstart book about it!
In my story, Earth Day — Hooray! (place value), the kids in the Maple Street Save-a-Planet Club collect aluminum cans for recycling, then use the money they made to plant flowers in Gilroy Park. How cool is that? That’s two good deeds for the planet!
Did you know aluminum can be recycled over and over? Or that recycling aluminum uses only 5% of the energy it takes to make aluminum for ore? (Ore is rock that has metal in it. For aluminum, the ore is called bauxite.)
The aluminum can was invented in 1959 by William K. Coors (yes, Coors beer) to create a metal container that could be recycled. Although glass bottles (“empties”) could be returned to stores, where they were picked up and taken to factories to be rewashed and reused, aluminum cans were lighter than glass and they didn’t break!
To celebrate Earth Day (and math, too), we have a special Earth Day—Hooray! Activities sheet with activities appropriate for all three MathStart levels.
This week’s other featured MathStart books are:
A House for Birdie Understanding capacity It’s Spring!
Animals on Board Adding Let’s hear it for animals!
This week’s featured I See I Learn story is Camille’s Team / Camila y su equipo (collaboration / colaborcion). Like the children in the Save-a-Planet Club, the Ready, Set Pre-K friends on Camille’s team are able to do amazing things when they work together.
What are you doing for Earth Day? Let’s make every day Earth Day!
Your friend, who loves to recycle and garden,
Stuart
Mathstart is a series of 63 storybooks organized into three levels for Pre-K through Grade 4. Each story teaches a different mathematical skill.
You can buy individual books, sets by level, or a complete library! Here is list of where to find MathStart books!
• Level 1, Pre-K/ Kindergarten:
A House for Birdie (understanding capacity)
Poor little Birdie! He doesn't have a house to protect him from the wind and rain. So his buddies — Spike, Queenie, Goldie, and Fidget, who range in shape from tall, thin, and narrow to short, fat and wide—decide to help him find one.They fly all over the neighborhood, but each house they come to is either too tall, too wide, too fat or too short for Birdie, but perfect for one of them. Just when the skies begin to cloud over and things look their bleakest, Birdie's friends pitch in to build a house that's just right for Birdie.
Capacity is an important concept in geometry.
• Level 2, Kindergarten / Grade 1:
Animals on Board (adding)
Wow! It's a caravan of trucks, each carrying an exotic load. There are three tigers on the first truck, followed by two more on the next truck. How many tigers in all? Then come trucks filled with different numbers of swans, frogs, horses and even pandas. How many are there of each animal? And where are they headed? And what's hidden under the tarp of driver Jill's extra-wide truck?
Simple addition equations help children to understand basic arithmetical operations.
• Level 3, Grades 2 - 4:
Earth Day — Hooray! (place value)
Members of Maple Street Save-the-Planet Club are cleaning up Gilroy Park when Ryan has a brainstorm: Instead of throwing aluminum cans in the garbage, why not bring them to the Recycling Center and use the money to buy flowers to decorate the park for Earth Day? Mrs. Watson, the club's advisor, figures out that they're going to need 5,000 cans, so the kids start a big collection campaign at school. Cans are grouped in bags of 10, 100 and 1,000. Recycling facts are sprinkled throughout the illustrations.
Understanding place value is key to working easily with large numbers.
ATTENTION TEACHERS! 20% off on book sets on the I See I Learn store!
I See I Learn is a series of 16 stories that follow the adventures of the children in Miss Cathy’s class at Ready, Set Pre-K in See-and-Learn City (see map).
Each story focuses on a different social, emotional, health & safety and cognitive skill important for success in school and in life. For Pre-K / Kindergarten.
Camille’s Team (cooperation )
Camille loves to build sand forts at the beach. But it’s hard to build a big fort alone. See what happens when Camille and her friends make a plan, work together, and share the fun.
Learning how to work together to achieve a goal helps children develop mutual respect. Children see that they can get more done—and have more fun doing it!
Share the work. Share the fun!
FREE PDF POSTER
Camila y su equipo (colaborcion)
A Camille le encanta construir castillos de arena en la playa. Pero, es difícil construir un castillo solita. Ve lo que sucede cuando Camille y sus amigos hacen un plan, trabajan juntos, y se divierten.
Aprendiendo como trabajar juntos para lograr una meta ayuda a los niños a desarrollar como respetar a los demás. ¡Los niños aprenden a completar más trabajos - y a divertirse mientras trabajan!
¡Compartir el trabajo! ¡Compartir la diversión!
FREE PDF POSTER
Do you have a story or a question? Please send me an email!