Cerrito Creek

Happy about it or not, a few students had the opportunity to take on an extension to today's math activity: what is the relationship between a polygon's number of sides and the sum of its interior angles?

Power Polygons™ help students find angle measures before introducing the difficult-to-use traditional protractor.

Cerrito's troupe played for most of the elementary grades today in their effort to demonstrate the powerful nature of words.

Cerrito salad enthusiasts (there are about four)  shared a salad of radishes, little gems, and miner's lettuce all cultivated in our back garden. Yum, yum.

Homework:
First reading group assignments due tomorrow. The first page of the reading group packet tells you what pages or chapters you need to read. Note that the whole book does not have to be read until mid-March!


Today the blue group practiced measuring in centimeters to calculate the perimeter of polygons and to consider the practical uses of perimeter.  We then continued work from Friday on creating and analyzing polygons.


Blue Group Homework:  Division and line plots.


Fourth grade math
Purple group:  Students started the day with a broken calculator problem, in which they couldn't use the 7 key, but had to write math expressions using addition and subtraction to equal the number 489.  We talked about equations, and how expressions on both sides of the equal sign have to be equivalent.


Then students gave advice about our question of the day:  How do we measure length accurately? Guidelines for measurement:

• Start at the zero on the ruler, of if you start at 1, subtract 1 from the number at the other end.
• Don't mix metric units (meter, centimeter, and millimeter) with US customary units (inches, feet, and yards).
• Line up the ruler and use your finger to mark the end of the ruler, as the point to start measuring again. 
• Write down how many times you move the ruler or each subtotal, to keep track.

Students practiced estimating the perimeter of things in our room, then measuring with rulers and meter sticks.

Fourth grade homework, due tomorrow
1. TERC Unit 4, pages 13-14
2. Practice multiplication fact family that gives you the most trouble for 10 minutes, using cards or Math Magician Multi


Fifth graders spent the morning measuring angles not with protractors but with other angles. They used polygon manipulatives to make deductions such as the following: if two equal angles put together form a right angle, then each of the angles must be equal to forty-five degrees. We will work with protractors, practice angle vocabulary, and play angle games in the week to come. 

Homework for the week:

Part 1, 2, 3, 4