Reading new words

In  Room 13 we have been looking at all the different things good readers do when they get stuck on a word. This poster shows how you can use strategies to help you figure out how to decode a new word.

How long is a minute?

On Tuesday, we started an investigation into how long a minute is.
We began with all of us standing up and sitting down when we thought one minute was up. Some children sat down way too soon and some stayed standing for over two minutes! But at exactly one minute, Gurnoor, Joanna and Inderveer all sat down. Good estimating from these three!
I asked how they knew when to sit down and Gurnoor and Joanna said it was because they counted to 60. Well done guys... but let’s test that. So, Gurnoor turned away from the class and the clock and counted to 60 but this time she finished her counting at just 35 seconds. So we tried counting bananas. One banana, two banana, three banana, four bananas and so on.... But we couldn’t get that quite right either. It will take a bit of practice to get that right and you will have to be good at counting, too!
Next, we tried to guess how many  beads we thought we could thread onto a string in a minute.
“59” said Veeral.
“15” said Jason.
“30” said Caleb.
So let’s get threading! Anusha, Hafsah, Andy, Sahibdeep and Jason all threaded as many beads onto a string as they could in one minute. Everybody threaded between 17 and 26. Caleb explained it was because it would take longer than a second to thread one bead. Gurnoor worked out that it would take around two minutes to thread 60 beads.
Okay then, so how many hops do you think you could do in a minute?
“60” said Anikesh.
“25” said Nandani.
“30” said Aayush.
“50’ said  Bhavik.
Alright, let’s find out. We chose Simraj to hop as we know he is very fit. We set the timer to one minute and Simraj started hopping.  At first, we all counted together but Simraj was so fast that I had to take over. In one minute Simraj hopped 153 times! At the end, he was very tired. And so this how we discovered that some things can happen in much less than a second. (Our athlete Simraj nearly did three hops in a second!)
It was really interesting finding out how even though a minute is always the same amount of time you can do more of some things and less of others!