We got so much done today!

 

This week has been absolutely fantastic.  The students have been working diligently, we have a vast majority of students getting their homework done, and we are following directions and exhibiting some good ROAR behavior.  We have gotten 3 paws in every special so far this week.

This morning we had a VERY long talk about what multiplying fractions actually means.  I am happy to report that many students are starting to get this, and I’m feeling quite encouraged.

Tonight students have 4 more problems to do.  As always the examples/notes we took today are attached, but students should have these in their math journals as well.

multfracsep14

 

In Language Arts we finally had a chance to talk a bit about the characters we had created.  We talked about how different characters would react to different situations.  In The Mysterious Benedict Society, Reynie would react differently to being teased than, say, Kate would.

Tonight students should take their character, and put them in one of the following situations. Write a short story about how they react to the situation.
They find $20 on the way home – what do they do with it?
They stub their toe – how do they react?
Their grandma gives them a really bad birthday present – what do they do/say?
Another person calls them a name – how do they react?
They get teased on the playground – what do they do?
They forget their homework – what do they tell the teacher?

Different characters would definitely react differently in these situations.  Try to put yourself in your character’s shoes, and think about what they would do or say.

In Social Studies we talked some about Christopher Columbus and Ponce De Leon.  What is Christopher Columbus famous for?  If you said discovering America, that would be incorrect!  It was actually Ponce De Leon who was first to land on America.  Tonight students have a short reading on Ponce De Leon and some questions to answer.

ponce-de-leon

 

In Science we talked a bit about herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores.  Sometimes vocabulary can be an issue with science, so we are going to make sure we get a good list of vocabulary in our science journal to help facilitate our understanding of animals and ecosystems and how they interact.

 

Finally we went outside and measured our plants.  I’m hoping we start seeing our new seedlings by next week.

 

so, tl;dr

Math problems involving multiplying fractions.  What is really going on in each problem?

multfracsep14

Write a short story using your character (put them in one of the situations listed above)

*Also finish your last two vocab squares*

Read about Ponce De Leon and answer some questions

ponce-de-leon

 

and as always, read!

 

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday!

 

Ok…multiplying fractions.  This is proving to be quite challenging for students.  That’s ok.  We’re running into some issues because some students are still rocky on what fractions actually are.  A fraction like 1/2 describes ONE piece of something that has been split into TWO equal parts.   3/4 describes THREE pieces of something that has been divided into FOUR equal parts.

Again, we are very interested in CONCEPTS here.  What exactly does multiplying by a fraction MEAN?  Oftentimes the ‘x’ symbol means “of”.  For example, 2 x 3 can mean 2 group OF 3.  So something like 1/2 x 3 can means 1/2 OF 3.

Tonight students have some more fraction multiplication problems to do.  They may pick just one way to do each problem.  For example if they have something like 3 x 1/2, they may either do 3 OF 1/2  or they may do 1/2 OF 3.  They should be careful though…usually one way is much easier than the other.  Students who are still having some difficulty with this concept should definitely continue to try both ways.

After these problems they have a question (really 4 questions) to respond to.  I expect a well thought out response here.  Not one sentence, and probably something involving some pictures explaining their thinking.

multfracandresponsesep13

 

In Social studies today we read some more about explorers and talked about what life was like for sailors on the ships making those extremely long voyages.  The students learned that being a sailor during these times was not glamorous or adventurous so much as it was dirty and dangerous.  Ask the students if they remember what scurvy was, or what sailors often ate.

Tonight students have some reading to do.  They should use this reading to help them label the parts of a Spanish Galleon.

labelingspanishgalleon

We then read a whole bunch of the Mysterious Benedict Society.  This book is so great.  The kids are getting ready to travel to the mysterious Nomansan Island where they will spy on Ledroptha Curtain and figure out why he is sending these subliminal messages all across the globe.

 

Tonight students should do vocabulary squares for the next 4 words on their -dict list.

vocablistdict

 

 

In science we started talking about ecosystems and biomes and somehow ended up talking about our gut biomes and all the little things that live on our bodies.  I seriously have no idea how these things get this way sometimes.  Oh well.  After that we went outside and replanted some seeds of some of our plants that had unfortunately died.  Hopefully these plants fare better.

 

 

so, tl;dr

Answer some math problems and a math prompt:

multfracandresponsesep13

next 4 words of vocab list vocab squares:

vocablistdict

Label a Spanish Galleon

labelingspanishgalleon

 

and read!

 

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Another Monday, another full week of opportunity!!

 

This morning we had a LOOOONNNNGG talk about multiplying fractions.  This entire concept is very important, and we are focusing on the actual meaning of multiplication and what multiplying fractions actually MEANS.  We are not interested in shortcuts, we are not interested in the fastest, quickest way to do a problem involving multiplying fractions.  We are interested in understanding what is actually going on with multiplication involving fractions.

so something like:

1/2 x 4

This can mean 1/2 OF 4, or it can mean 4 OF 1/2.  Sometimes we will find that one way of thinking about a problem can lead to an easier solution.  We used our math manipulatives (the play money) to help us work out a lot of these problems, and students should use those same manipulatives tonight when they are working on homework.

As usual we took some notes:

multfracsep12

Our homework tonight is to do 4 fraction multiplication problems.  They should be done EXACTLY as we did our examples.  This means a question like 1/10 x 3 should be done as 1/10 OF 3, AND as 3 OF 1/10.  These don’t look the same, but they give us an equivalent answer.  As always, there are examples that precede the homework:

multfracexamplesandhomeworksep12

 

In Language Arts we barely had time to talk about our new vocabulary words and our new root this week: dict.  Monday schedules are so screwy.  Tonight students should work on their vocabulary squares (rectangles really) for the first four words on their vocabulary list.  They should also know how to spell these!  The vocabulary test is the only test during the week where spelling matters.

vocablistdict

 

 

In science we went and measured and watered our plants.  Lots of our plants are actually growing quite well.  Some are measuring almost 20cm already.  However some of our plants didn’t fare too well in the last week, so we will be replanting some of our seeds tomorrow.  We got to talk about how spiders being around our plants is actually a good thing today.  Ask your student if they remember why spiders are good for our plants. (hint: they eat the bugs)

 

 

So, tl;dr

Some multiplying fractions problems, JUST as we did them in class (use your play money!)

multfracsep12

multfracexamplesandhomeworksep12

 

First four vocab word squares in vocabulary journal

vocablistdict

 

And read!

 

Have a good one,

 

-Mr. Potter

 

Tomorrow is early release.  Please know that school will end at 12:30.

We are also having our first celebration tomorrow.  The students earned 75 paws, which got us our first medal.  For our celebration students decided we would watch a short film, followed by some board game time.  All the while we will be chewing gum.  Make sure you get all of your homework finished, as students who have outstanding homework will instead spend celebration time working on that.

 

This morning we did more work with decimals and multiplying simple fractions by whole numbers.  We continued discussing how we can take numbers like 3.4 and think of it as 3 and 4/10 or 3 + 4 x 1/10 in order to solve different problems.

Tonight students have a few more equivalencies to write.  I wonder if tomorrows quiz is going to look JUST like this…

formsofdecimalsandfractionssep8

 

We continued our talk about explorers (or should we call them exploiters?) today.  It’s interesting to get students’ ideas about these individuals.  Student images of them are usually pretty positive, and often people see their contributions to the modern day as good things.  However rarely were they motivated by a love of humanity or knowledge.  When we get down to it, many of these individuals weren’t exactly the best of people.

Tonight students should finish the questions that go along with our reading.

ageofexploration

In science we took a good look at our gardens.  A few of our seeds have not yet germinated.  This means we will replant some of them tomorrow.  We also started measuring.  We decided that we can use string to measure the plants from soil to tip of stem.

 

Finally we spent a good amount of time today organizing our math manipulatives.  They have turned into a great big pile of messes, and we sorted and organized them today.  It’s funny how much the students enjoyed this.  I’m fairly certain none of them go home excited about cleaning and organizing their room, or folding their clothes.  However when it comes to sorting play money into bins or putting pop cubes in bags, they are having the time of their lives.

 

 

 

so, tl;dr

Finish some math equivalencies:

formsofdecimalsandfractionssep8

Finish the questions that go with our reading:

ageofexploration

 

And as always, read and get your reading log signed!

 

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Reminder: Tomorrow (9-8) is PICTURE DAY!

 

This week is so short!

This morning we continued talking about how decimals are simply fractions in base 10 form.  We talked about multiplying simple fractions, and how we can represent numbers in these different forms.

For example:

4 x 1/10 = 4/10 = .4

These are all different ways to represent an equivalent value.  They aren’t the SAME, but they ARE equivalent (have the same value).  This is important because sometimes different forms of a number will help us to do certain things easier.

Tonight students have some of these equivalencies to do.  As always there are examples (In the form of last night’s homework)

decimalfractionpracticesep7

 

This week we began our foray into social studies by talking about the human timeline on Earth up to the age of exploration, which really begins the modern day history of the United States.  Tonight students have some more reading on this to do, and some simple questions to answer.

ageofexploration

 

In science we went outside, took a look at our plants, and realized they were missing two VERY important things: Water, and sunlight.  We had placed our plants right up against the side of the building so as to avoid the tropical storm that hit us this Labor Day weekend.  This unfortunately meant they weren’t getting much sunlight.  We moved our planters out into open sunlight and gave them a good watering.  Hopefully we’ll see some improvement in the next few days.

 

We talked a great deal about how we can see if our plants our doing well or not.  We decided one way to do this would be to measure their growth.  We then talked about how we can go about recording this data in an easy to see and understand way.  This lead to us creating some graphs that we will use to record the growth data on our plants.

 

Please remember TOMORROW IS PICTURE DAY!!!

so, tl;dr

Write out some equivalencies:

decimalfractionpracticesep7

Read and answer some questions (the first five) about the age of exploration:

ageofexploration

 

And read!

 

Have a good one,

 

-Mr. Potter

Fastest update ever, because I need to go pick up my daughter from her first day of school – apologies!

 

Math!

Examples PLUS equivalencies to write:

MathSep6

 

Social Studies (explorers and such!)

ExplorationSep6

 

And read!

 

Students also took home their interims today.  Please take a look and get those signed.

 

have a good one!

 

-Mr. Potter

APTT is tonight!  I hope everyone is able to attend.  You may arrive at 5:15 to drop your children off.  There are activities for students and smaller children as well.  We will then begin our session at 5:30.

 

Today was basically a huge effort in getting our seedlings transplanted in our planters outside.  This took a LOT of our day, but hopefully everyone had a good time.  I have a ton of pictures that I will be sharing with everyone later.

 

That said, we did get a bit of other work done, and have just a *bit* of homework:

Write me an introduction for your character you created last night.  This should be 2-3 paragraphs and look like the beginning of a story, when a character is introduced.

 

Also, answer these problems:

DecimalProblemsSep1

 

And that’s it (besides reading of course!)

Students had a bit of time to work on these in class when we weren’t going crazy with all of our planting and such, so I’d be VERY surprised if they have much of this left to finish.

 

 

Again, I hope I see you tonight at APTT,

-Mr. Potter

TOMORROW Thursday, September 1st is our first APTT meeting.  I would really love an opportunity to talk with you about our students and their progress.  APTT gives us a great chance to look at data and talk about student achievement.  I hope everyone is able to make it.  It begins at 5:30 pm in our classroom, room 139.

 

Sorry, this has to be super short as I have a meeting to make:

 

We are working a lot with decimals.  The kids seem to be getting it, which is encouraging.  We ran out of time before I could explain/hand out the homework.  Lucky for everyone!

 

In Language Arts we are talking about character traits and creating characters for our writing.  We discussed how every little bit of detail can help our readers to understand our characters.  Tonight students should create a character.  They should describe how the character looks, acts, and other details.  This should be something of their OWN CREATION.  Not a cartoon character, not a character from a video game or a book.  Yes all works are at some level derivatives of others, but let’s do our best to come up with something of our own on this!

 

We took a look at a character from Thy Mysterious Benedict Society as an example.

CharacterExample

CharOrganizer

 

Other than that, they should simply finish their vocabulary squares.  They should have done 5 already, so that just leaves 5 more for tonight.

Quite a lite load honestly.

read!

Sorry for the quick post.

Have a good one,

 

-Mr. Potter

A reminder: This Thursday, September 1st is our first APTT meeting.  I would really love an opportunity to talk with you about our students and their progress.  APTT gives us a great chance to look at data and talk about student achievement.  I hope everyone is able to make it.

 

This morning we continued our talk about decimals.  We discussed  again how decimals are just another way to describe fractions in base 10.  We have been breaking out the play money and doing a lot of our work with decimals using the manipulatives.  Honestly students have been doing work with decimals for years when they use money, just nobody told them about it.

Tonight students have a set of decimal numbers to look at.  They should look at each underlined digit and give me THREE ways to describe the value of that digit.

For example if I had 3.62

The digit 2 is underlined. I can describe its value in these three simple ways:

2 tenths, OR 2/10 OR 0.02

It’s important students cement this idea that everything to the right of the decimal point is describing a fractional value that is smaller than 1.

Decimal_Place_Value_Aug30

We also talked about how we can solve some of the more challenging multiplication problems on our homework and quizzes lately.  Essentially we are solving for unknown values in equations when we have an answer and some known values.  It’s pretty neat stuff, and should be some interesting logic puzzles for the students.  We went over strategies for this today and took some notes in our math journal.  We then copied down four of these types of problems.  Tonight students should finish these in their math journal.

Unknowns_Aug30

 

In Language Arts we started discussing our Greek and Latin roots notebook.  This is a book that students will be using to record our weekly vocabulary work.  Students received a list of vocabulary words today based on the root ‘ped’.  Tonight, they are responsible for creating vocabulary squares for the first five words.  We did the first word as an example:

VocabSquare

Finally, we did some observations of our seeds.  These things are getting big quickly, and we hopefully will get them transplanted fast.

 

 

so, tl;dr

define some decimal values:

Decimal_Place_Value_Aug30

Solve for unknowns:

Unknowns_Aug30

Finish vocab squares in vocabulary notebook:

VocabSquare

 

and read!

 

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Happy Monday!

A reminder: This Thursday, September 1st is our first APTT meeting.  I would really love an opportunity to talk with you about our students and their progress.  APTT gives us a great chance to look at data and talk about student achievement.  I hope everyone is able to make it.

 

I love Mondays.  So much to do, and a week full of possibilities.  By Friday when we’ve only gotten half of what I planned to do finished I’m ready to have a breakdown, but Mondays are great!

 

So this morning we did some talk concerning decimals.  We discussed how really ‘decimal’ numbers are just ways we can represent fractions in base 10.  We talked about how to name decimal numbers, and different forms of decimal numbers.

 

For example, the idea that .3 = .30

If we thought of this using money, it’s like saying 3/10ths of a dollar (3 dimes) is equivalent to 30/100ths of a dollar (30 pennies).

 

Tonight students have some problems to work out using the distributive property of multiplication over addition.  Later this week we will move on to some work with decimals.

DPOMOAHomeworkAug29

 

We then read some more of The Mysterious Benedict Society.  Things are starting to get interesting, and next chapter we’ll learn about what big dangerous thing is happening that Mr. Benedict is worried about…

 

This week we will be focusing quite a bit on character traits, and how authors define a character by their actions, thoughts, and feelings.  Normally a character’s actions will tell us quite a bit about them.  For instance in the book we are reading, Reynie and Constance display VERY different behavior.  That behavior encourages us to like Reynie, and note quite so much Constance.  In this way authors can actually attempt to control their readers’ emotions.  Pretty awesome, or creepy, depending upon how you look at it.

 

In science, we are still talking about producers, consumers, decomposers, and all that jazz.  Many of our seeds germinated over the weekend!!  We will be transplanting them outside even sooner than I had thought, which is fantastic.  Before you know it, we’ll be eating some vegetable that we grew ourselves.

 

Tonight students have some questions about energy flow within ecosystems to answer.  They should use their science textbook to answer these questions.  Each question they answer should be accompanied by the page in their textbook where they found that information.

EnergyFlow

 

so, tl;dr

Complete some multiplication using area models:

DPOMOAHomeworkAug29

Answer some questions about energy flow, and make sure you find the information in your textbook, and mark the page number next to each answer on the sheet:

EnergyFlow

 

and read!

 

Have a good one,

 

-Mr. Potter