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| Birthday sharing and appreciation |
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| Students began cursive practice today. Good for the hand, good for the brain, good for the class. Students are working at sitting up straight. |
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| Is that a flying squirrel? Nope, just a fifth grader getting what he needs on the yard. |
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| The word sorts in Words Their Way are getting decidedly more challenging. |
Homework:
Reading group jobs (this is the night when you should finish your book!)
Math:
Fourth grade math
Purple group: Our warm up today involved mental math and place value, looking at which places change when you add or subtract multiples of ten or one hundred. Then we discussed the difference between "Showing" and "Telling," or "Explaining" your work. I returned some work students had completed last week using geoboards to find area, and asked students to explain their thinking in more detail. Finally, students worked on dividing "Crazy Cakes" into two equal sections, and providing evidence for how they knew they were equal. Strategies students used were to divide and conquer, surround and chop, or find a line of mirror symmetry.
Fourth grade math homework, due tomorrow
Purple group:
1. Complete Unit 4, pages 61, 65, and 66, which you can download here
2. Fifteen minutes multiplication fact practice
Fourth Grade Blue Group: Each day the Blue Group is practicing and being introduced to mathematical concepts as part of our warm up activities. Today we began by practicing the conversion of inches to feet, then feet to yards and back to inches. Variables were introduced last week and we are working with problems, such as, A x 5 = 35, solve for A. We discussed "variables" as unknown values (letter "A" in this case) that change depending upon the problem. Students are also learning how to use parenthesis in the order of operations, for example, determining where parenthesis go to make this problem work: 9 x 2 - 4 + 5 = 9. Our main lesson today focused on finding the area with polygons on geo-boards, and continuing our work with area in square centimeters for rectangles based on the formula of length x width = Area.
Blue Group Homework: Each student has a specific goal in thepacket for homework (about 2 pages) as indicated on the pages in the packet they are bringing home.
Fifth graders went over last week's assessment, which was graded with a rubric that described students' ability to show their work, explain their answers with words, get the right answer, and take a test. We revisit decimals in this next unit, in addition to fractions and percents. Partial number concepts are tricky and constitute some of the most challenging work for fifth grade math students.
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