Today was Abacus day!

First we very briefly went over the mental math strategies we were talking about yesterday.  These strategies may seem simple and unneeded, but as we become more adept at them, we will move onto more challenging problems and uses.

Next we all made our own abacus!

We will be using this as we talk about numbers and operations in the upcoming weeks.  Students will also need to use their abacus in a video they make about addition and another video about subtraction.  What I’m saying here, is DO….NOT…LOSE…IT.

Also treat your abacus with consideration and care.  It’s sturdy, but not little brother or sister proof.

Making the abacus took us quite some time, so we didn’t actually have time to discuss their function.  We will get into those details and do a ton of exercises tomorrow.

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Today we started talking about mental math, and some strategies we can utilize when adding numbers mentally.

I know that addition is combining terms.  This means I can break apart those terms as I see fit and combine them in any way that would make it easy on myself.

For example a simple problem like 9 + 7

I can see that my answer is going to be larger than 10.  So I try to make a ten easily first.  I know that 9 is one away from ten.  This means I’m going to break up my 7 into a 1, and a 6.

So my problem goes from

9 + 7

to

9 + 1 + 6

10 + 6

16

This is a good strategy for students to have when adding numbers, and one of many we will be working on.

Tonight students should finish this simple worksheet on this idea.  Please make sure you read the directions:

mental-math-practice

We also did a good round of centers today, some focused on base number systems, and others on our own base 10 system.

We also got together some of the parts that we will be using tomorrow to make an abacus!

We will be adding and subtracting with our abacus, and we’ll have to make a video where we solve a problem using the abacus.

Finally we took some quick notes on addition:

addition-notes

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Today we did quite a bit of work with our Abaci.

We learned how to represent multi digit numbers, and how to do simple addition with an abacus.

Essentially the abacus works by representing each place value as a rung.  The beads on the bottom row we will think of as ones, the second row as tens, and so on.  We may adjust this later for some more complex problems, but for now the simple whole number place values will suffice.

Tonight students have some addition problems that they should do on their abacus.  They should then write down the process they used to solve the problems on the abacus.  This is all detailed on the worksheet they received:

using-your-abacus

We did the first page together:

firstpage

Please remember that tomorrow we have a test.  This test covers more base 10 things, such as using powers of ten and expanded forms.  There will also be a question or two asking you to convert/figure out a base.  Finally there will be 4 questions that ask you to use your abacus to perform arithmetic.

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Today we made our abacusses! Abacussesses! um…Abacuss’?Abbaci?

Um….we each made an abacus!

This took a bit longer than I had expected, and as such, we barely had time to talk about their function.  We will get into those details tomorrow.

If you missed today, we’ll have to whirlwind one together for you tomorrow.

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Today we started talking about mental math, and some strategies we can utilize when added numbers mentally.

I know that addition is combining terms.  This means I can break apart those terms as I see fit and combine them in any way that would make it easy on myself.

For example a simple problem like 9 + 7

I can see that my answer is going to be larger than 10.  So I try to make a ten easily first.  I know that 9 is one away from ten.  This means I’m going to break up my 7 into a 1, and a 6.

So my problem goes from

9 + 7

to

9 + 1 + 6

10 + 6

16

This is a good strategy for students to have when adding numbers, and one of many we will be working on.

Tonight students should finish this simple worksheet on this idea.  Please make sure you read the directions:

mental-math-practice

We also did a good round of centers today, some focused on base number systems, and others on our own base 10 system.

We also got together some of the parts that we will be using tomorrow to make an abacus!

We will be adding and subtracting with our abacus, and we’ll have to make a video where we solve a problem using the abacus.

Finally we took some quick notes on addition:

addition-notes

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Another day, another discussion of base ten!

Today we talked about powers of ten, and how as we have a base 10 system, each place value in our system is described by a power of ten.  This means that multiplying or dividing by 10 in our system is fairly simple and straightforward.  We took some notes on this:

base10andpowersoften

And then we talked about how our system is actually TOO good at representing numbers.  It’s so good, that we often forget just how big or how small numbers are.  For example a number like 222 doesn’t look that large..

until I ask you to draw 222 dots, or make 222 tally marks.

Which is what we did next in our example book!

multiplyingby10makesthingsbig

And what if I asked you to draw 2222 things?  Yeah…no thanks.

To hit home this  ideas that multiplying by 10 makes things very big very fast (exponential growth!) and that dividing by 10 makes things very small very fast, we watched this neat video about relative size in the universe:

Powers of Ten

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

The days are too short!

Today we quickly finished up those notes from yesterday in some classes (others were already finished thankfully)

base10_notes

We then talked quickly about exponentiation.

And how something like:

2^3

Does NOT mean 2 x 3!!

We discussed powers of ten, and how in our BASE 10 system, the BASE of all of our place values, is 10!

So something such as 456

Is made up of:

4 x 10^2

5 x 10^1

6 x 10^0

We did a quick example of this in our example notebooks, and also a quick explanation of why anything raised to the 0 power is 1.

dissectinganumberexample

So in any base system, the base is what we group in, and each place value is based on that number.

Finally we talked a bit more about base 2, and then did some work writing numbers in base 2.  Tonight students should finish this worksheet (the front) if they have not already:

base2exercise

Tomorrow we will do some more work with base 10 and other bases, and do some centers that give us a good bit of practice.

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

Today was an extremely short day as we had early dismissal.

As such, we didn’t get much finished.  First we took some notes on Base 10 that is essentially rehashing our conversation from yesterday:

base10_notes

After that we had an i-ready growth check we had to do.

And then we were out of time!

Early releases can be annoying.

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter

In class today we talked about expectations, and what perfect students in the perfect class would be doing.  Students came up with lists and then we shared some of our lists.  Many students had very similar lists that included things such as:

Students are working diligently

Students are talking quietly when appropriate

Students are listening and paying attention

Students are respectful of the teacher and other students

Students are kind to each other

I was quite impressed with the students’ responses.  Both for their obvious understanding of what good classroom behavior looks like, and for their use of fantastic vocabulary as they described these things to me.  I am confident that both the students and I are  on the same page when it comes to what our classroom should look like.

Next we discussed the base 10 system.  We talked about how it is called the base 10 system because we have 10 different numerals (digits):

0  1   2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9

These are the only numerals we have.  Quite some years ago some very intelligent individuals in India devised this system of counting and grouping things in tens.  It is ingenious how we can use these simple 10 digits in order to represent literally any number we can think of.

We also discussed very quickly what a base 2 (binary) system would look like.  In a base 2 system, the only numerals would be 0 and 1.  We talked very briefly about how we could count in such a system.

This week we will continue our discussion of base 10 and counting systems.  We will also do some exploring of other base systems.

Here is a quick video recapping our discussion today of the base 10 system:

Base 10 review

Have a good one,

-Mr. Potter