The other day we applied some of our recent work with decimals, fractions, and percents during our morning work and we created the above graph that shows what the typical school day looks like in Room 208. At first the kids were insulted that recess was such a small piece of the pie. But as we continued to talk about what information the graph provides the viewer, one of my quieter girls noticed that we spent 14% of our "perfect day" not learning something. As I was getting ready to spring from that into a discussion about why I try to integrate learning into recess (chess, checkers, backgammon, math games, etc), during lunch (book groups and voluntary tutoring), and dismissal (class jobs and DEAR time) - just as I was ready to climb onto my soapbox, another one of the girls astutely added, "and how often are we actually in the classroom for writing at 2:55?" The students began to recognize how important every minute is.
A couple of days later we used the morning work to estimate what the average week in our life looked like:
This led to even better discussion about how we choose to spend our time. They weren't too happy that over 40% of their week was spent sleeping (we came up with the average amount of sleep for the class as 10 hours a night).
Next up - The Average Year. The goal? To help them understand that what they choose to do outside of school is important.
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