gahhhh! WE ARE SO OUT OF TIME!
So after specials this morning we had a middle school information session that ran 60 minutes over schedule, for a total of 90 minutes…….*SIGH*.
Tonight there is another informational session dealing with East Wake Middle School here at Lockhart. It begins at 6pm in the media center. If your student is going to East Wake next year I highly encourage you to attend.
This all meant math was extremely rushed, as was the rest of our day (not like we weren’t already!)
We barely had time to talk about word problems and last night’s work. However it became quickly apparent that many of our students had problems with creating their own word problems (hah! pun intended) Here is an example of what we saw today (some names are changed to protect the innocent):
I had 3/4 of a candy bar. Mr. Potter had 2/3 of a bag of candy. How many books are there?
This highlighted the fact that many of us were not really thinking about what the question was, or what our fractions were describing, or what we were actually writing on or own paper, or what planet we live on. Some are simply taking the numbers and performing a random operation.
Tonight students should take these three problems and write a word problem for each. Tomorrow we will drill these until we have a better idea of what each type of problem would look like.
4/6 – 2/5
4/6 + 2/5
4/6 * 2/5
In language arts we did a LOT of writing. We will focus most of our time this week on getting our research papers done. They aren’t due until the last day of school, but next week we will have little to no time to work on them with Case 21s taking up half of the week.
Tonight students should do any re-writing they still have to do on their intro and first body paragraph. They should also come tomorrow with 3 paragraphs: intro, first body paragraph, and 2nd body paragraph.
In Science we looked at the Iditarod, and saw how the current first and second place are a father and son! Past champions of the Iditarod even! The weather has also been a problem, and 2 mushers got lost on the trail because of a snow storm.
Right now it is unseasonably warm, but they are still experiencing snowstorms, heavy winds, and snow. It makes for a lot of neat things we can talk about.
We had little time after that, so we did a VERY quick crash course on transfer of energy. Essentially we talked quickly about the Kelvin scale, and how what we think of as ‘cold’ isn’t really cold on a cosmic scale. Ice and other things we think of as ‘cold’ have heat energy.
Even though we didn’t really get into the topic, I handed out the homework anyway. I gave them this quick and dirty explanation of the three main types of heat transfer:
conduction: things are touching and molecules are bumping into each other
convection: air and liquids are moving
radiation: the sun and fire
Honestly these are awful explanations, and tomorrow we will go much deeper into this. I just wanted them to take a few stabs at the FRONT ONLY of the worksheet. They don’t need to do the back, or fill in the definitions at all. We’ll talk about them tomorrow when we really explore this topic.
Heat_Transfer
ok, tl;dr
Write a word problem that goes along with each of these:
4/6 – 2/5
4/6 + 2/5
4/6 * 2/5
Come in with intro and first two body paragraphs of research paper written (rough draft)
do the FRONT ONLY of this sheet:
Heat_Transfer
and read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter