Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The morning message had students adding punctuation and paragraphing to an informal letter.

More typing practice. My motto: "practice makes purple." 

Hillary worked with students on using graphic organizers for writing.

I was amazed how focussed the students were until 3 o'clock today. Students worked in partnerships to construct a timeline of California based on different types of maps.
Read for 30 minutes
Spelling practice
Math
Fourth graders completed an assesment this morning to check their automaticity with multiplication facts, first completing all the problems they "just knew" in 5 minutes, then going back to work on the more challenging combinations.  Then students used computers or games to practice facts they were working on. Other students worked to find patterns in some challenging number sequences.

4th grade math homework (due tomorrow)
Optional Problem of the Week: 3 Light Switches (due Tues., Oct. 11)



Fifth graders worked on their problem of the week this morning, a classic puzzle that asks students to count the number of squares on a 6x6 grid (you can download it on yesterday's blog). Each day of the week, I reveal a few more suggestions to help students along. Today, we used a t-chart to look for patterns in the number of squares there are of each size. We talked about how "mathematicians are lazy" (one of my mantras) and are always looking for patterns and shortcuts. 

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