Monday, December 12, 2011

The crazy week before the holidays...I just have to keep their heads in school for a few more days. We will be finishing up our marine biology unit, watching a film on conquistadors, publishing the second issue of The Chanterelle, and more.


Rae is this week's poet, and here's the poem she shared:


What is the opposite of baby?
The answer is a grown-up, maybe.


Richard Wilbur, More Opposites




Homework
Analogies packets - first two pages
Read for 30 minutes
Math:
Fourth grade math
Purple group

Some students switched groups again today based on their performance on the pre-assessment, to begin our new unit called Multiplication Towers and Division Stories.  In the purple group, students answered as many multiplication problems as they could in 5 minutes as a warm up, since we will be working on mastering automaticity with multiplication facts through 12.  Then the students in the periwinkle subgroup, who have already mastered double-digit multiplication, worked on the Paper Pool project, in which they looked for patterns in the bouncing of a pool ball on different dimension grids.  Students in the plum subgroup highlighted multiplication facts they are still memorizing on their 5 minute warm up, which they will use for homework tonight.  Then we looked at breaking apart numbers in double-digit multiplication problems to make arrays, and students worked on solving 12 x 14 using this approach.

Fourth grade math homework, due tomorrow

Give your parents their letter (download here).

Purple group
Option 1 (plum): Multiplication cardsinstructions & Unit 3, page 4
Option 2 (periwinkle):  Estimating products
5th graders are finishing up their short unit on subtracting large numbers and place value this week. They played a much more difficult variation of the game Close to 100 called Close to 7500. I tell the students that it is mostly a matter of finding seven-thousand four hundred ninety ten. In other words, it requires that you use a more advanced understanding of place value to add large numbers instead of an algorithm. This week's homework is in two parts:

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