Who We Are

Finding the Numbers in Football

Grade K-2, Math, Who We Are

Numbers are all around us; we just need to look for them. So often, we choose to ignore the numbers right in front of us—the numbers that are part of our everyday routines and the daily desires of our students. Or maybe we don’t choose to ignore them. Maybe we are so conditioned to a particular curriculum or methodology that we bypass the logic of everyday numbers entirely. We don’t mean to; it is just something that happens. But what if “page 24, section b, scenario number 8” was not what happened tomorrow? What if the only thing that happened was answering a single question . . . How did Ronaldo get so good at football?

Quick! Look carefully, there’s footballs flying at you. Left, right look everywhere. How many footballs do you see? A quick flash thinking exercise as a warm-up, a crash course in subitizing that keeps them alert for the game. The only preparation? Copy and pasting some footballs onto some slides, or even having the kids cut out some footballs themselves and gluing them onto index cards to challenge their friends. Tell the kids its a way to warm-up for the match. Ronaldo stays alert with his mind and his body to think quick during a game.

Time to warm up! Now that our minds are warmed up, it’s time to do the same with our bodies. Heading out to the track for some exercises builds both our strength and our rote counting skills. One by one, the children pick an exercise they want to lead and choose the count for how many repetitions we are going to do together. Most of the children count by ones, but some choose to challenge their teammates with skip-counting. As they go down with each push-up, you can hear them chant: “5, 10, 15, 20…”

Ronaldo always warms up before he plays.

Okay ready to play! But wait . . . we need Jerseys. Ronaldo is number 7, but what number do you want to be? The children design their own Jersey and write their favorite number on the back. Can you identify all the numbers from the Jerseys of your friends? What numbers are missing? We write down a list of the numbers we are missing in case more friends want to join us to play later.

Finally, we are ready to play, but there is a problem… there are 8 students. How many students should we have on each team? We use our paper players as concrete manipulatives, moving them around to figure out what even teams look like and practicing our problem-solving skills. “Even” means that the teams have the same number of players. It looks like there will be 4 players on each team, since 4 + 4 = 8. Let’s double-check with a part-part-whole model to ensure our teams have two equal parts!

It’s time to play, we just need a way to keep score. The children decide they can use a white board to write a tally each time one of the teams gets a goal. At the end, we will know how many goals each team scored. One child volunteers to be the official score-keeper, proudly recording each mark.

Great job, teams! The game is done. But before we can go to snack, we need to compare the numbers to see which team won. Twelve is larger than 4, but by how much? Let’s use the “count on” strategy to figure it out together: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. That’s 8 more than 4! Can anyone tell me how many goals were scored altogether? Let’s start tomorrow by calculating the total number of goals. I wonder if fewer or more goals will be scored the next time you play.

Time to have our snack to fuel up for some recess and more football! Ronaldo would be back on the field before no time.

Weather Patterns around the World

Grade K-2, Science, Who We Are

PYP Who We Are


Central Idea: Awareness of weather patterns inspires people to create solutions for living safely and comfortably in different places.

Lines of Inquiry:

  • Patterns in weather in different places (form)
  • How people design solutions to solve problems (causation)
  • How people prepare for and respond to weather (responsibility)

What? Students explore their own identity through reflecting on memorable weather experiences and how they needed to respond to different types of weather.

How? This project began because of a student inquiry in the response to the question, “is the weather always the same in every country?” Students and families were asked to email 3-5 photos of their child experiencing weather in a different country to the teacher. It could be a country the child used to live in or a country the child had visited on vacation. Once I received the photos, I put together a basic “presentation” for the child (although if time permits and students have the tech skills, students could do this piece themselves.) Each child then shared about their weather experience, first showing where the country was on a map of the world and then sharing the photos. For the share, children discussed their experience with weather and any seasonal patterns they know of in that country and. how they needed to prepare of the type of weather they were sharing about.

Here is the outline for the presentation-

1. Child shares where their country is on a map
2. Child shares what the weather was like in the country when they were there and what they needed to prepare for that type of weather.
3. Presenter answers questions from classmates.

Why? Allowing the children to “take us” all over the world with this fun presentation, provided an opportunity for each child to share a place and a memory vastly important to them. Identity was explored further when each child got to both ask and answer questions from their classmates about their experiences, allowing us to learn new things about one another. Since many children had never experienced a different weather type than a sunny and rainy weather pattern, this provided an opportunity for students to be knowledgable and learn from each other. We practiced our listening skills, question asking skills, and presentation skills, all while being Inquirers about each other’s lives and why different weather patterns exist.

Our final weather patterns map after each child had shared their weather experiences. This map was teacher created throughout the unit using the data students shared about their weather experiences in each country.

Additional Note:

Incorporating weather into a Who We Are unit was both a challenge and an eye-opening experience for me as an educator. This unit came as a review of our Science Curriculum to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards, a product of robust conversation and questioning as to its fit. Although there are still much elements on How the World Works in this unit, it was clear from teaching it that our experiences with weather do indeed play a huge part in how we grow up and who we become.