Monday, October 24, 2011

Plastic Bags and Big Numbers!

We were making tens out of bags. -Rhianna
We've got 1810 plastic bags! -Olivia
The first day we had only 46. Now we have 1810. In gym we played Halloween games. -Tristan
I was having fun. -Sam
I was at Gym and we were playing Ghostbusters. There are 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and then Halloween! -Nicholas
It was Madeline's birthday and she gave us cookies. -Peyton
We had Gym and we played lots of games. They were
Halloween games. -Taylor
We were doing the Plastic Bag Round Up. We found a soft bag.
First you shake it, then you pull it, then turn it inside out and
into an umbrella. -Cameron
We read a new book called Timmy the Tumble Bag. It was from Mrs. Dent Scarcello. -Kendall

Our Plastic Bag Round Up has had a very successful start. In just 1 week the children have collected over 1800 bags! Each day our 'collectors' go to each classroom to collect bags from the other children. It's always very exciting when they come back with a full garbage bag. Today we tried to estimate the number of bags in our pile before we counted. We had estimates ranging from 130 to 8000. Many children looked at the pile we'd already collected, looked at our pile for the day and made their guess. We had lots of kids that estimated around 1000 bags (our actual count was 953)... not bad!
This project has been quite exciting for me as well. The kids have completely taken ownership of the collection, counting, organization, and advertising for it. They know how to get the bags ready for counting and they've developed a system for keeping track of how many bags go into the large garbage bags (they make piles of 10 and one student marks the 10s on the whiteboard as they are added to the bag). Not only have they created an accurate and efficient system for counting, they are learning about taking care of our environment, the importance of recycling, how things are recycled into new things, the importance of good advertising when you have an important message to share, how to count in groups, how to add large numbers, how to work together with a group of people, how to compromise when necessary, and most importantly that small people can do big things. I'm always amazed at how much a group of 5, 6 and 7 year olds can do when they care about something and work together. Awesome :) -Mrs. Malkoske

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Mrs. Malkoske's Class,
You have wrote a lot of stuff so far. - Kaelan
I love how you are looking after the environment by collecting bags. - Mrs.Kosolowski
wow you have collected alot
of plastic bags!-Samantha
Holy moly! I hope that my class gets to have fun at gym doing the halloween activities!-Lauren
wow you collected a lot of plastic bags i hope you can collect even more over the next few days. Your doing great by the way i am excited to see how much you earn!-Cecilia
wow seems like your having a good school year- Jessica
you guys have been doing alot of colecting bags for frizbees.Keep up the GOOD work!!! - Ally
I like your new blog. - Sofia

Anonymous said...

I was reading your Plastic Bag post. It sounded like it went well. It was a really cool idea. How meny bags did you get?

Tyler in Mr.H's class :)

Anonymous said...

I like your Shelfari. Stick Dog is a good book. Did you enjoy reading that book?

Gal in Mr. H's class

Mrs. Dent Scarcello said...

Hi Mrs. Malkoske's Class,
Thanks for leaving us a comment. We are answering here so you will see our response.

We have 5480 bags so far and we still have lots of bags in our classroom to count. - Mason

The difference between the amounts of bags we have is 3236. -Rachel

Both of our classes have lots of bags. The total is 7724! How many bags do you think you will collect? - Brooke

It is awesome how many bags you have already! - Kayla

Our goal is 10 000 plastic bags. What is your goal? - Jada

People after people are walking into our classroom with bags. Have people been coming to your room too? - Katie

Do you think you are going to win the plastic bag bench? -Peyton

Anonymous said...

I was reading your plastic bag post and i thought it was cool. How many bags did you collect?

Sydney in Mr. H's class

Anonymous said...

I am in Mr.H`s class. My name is Ava. I like your post about the birthdays. I really like birthdays and I like all your posts and your Shelfari. Have a great birthday. What books are you going to read next?

Ava in Mr. H's class

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for your support. I pick up plastic bags so thank you. I like your heart. You are loving people. Was it hard to collect all the bags?

Marie in Mr. H's class