Our class is a ridiculous mountain range of books!
So this morning we took apart our class library. We talked about how libraries are normally organized, and how our class library *was* organized by author’s last name, but has somehow strangely become a jumble of books since the beginning of the year 😉
So we set to work organizing it. We took out some books that have gone past the point of repair, and did a great job organizing and adding some new books.
However this took longer than Mr. Potter anticipated, so we just kind of stopped halfway through, and went on with our class day. We’ll finish it tomorrow morning, but for the time being our class is a hilarious booksplosion.
First thing we did today was go over last night’s homework. The students are getting MUCH better at these word problems. The entire point of the exercise is to get students in the habit of thinking about HOW to solve the problem instead of just grabbing the numbers they see and smashing them together. It is also to encourage students to check their answer to make sure they are actually asking what the question asked.
Tonight things go a little bit backwards. Here are two equations. Students should write their OWN word problem that would be solved by each equation. They should then go about solving it in the manner we have been.
36 + 48 =
25 – 7 =
So next we took some time going over what a plot synopsis, or a summary looks like. Many students struggled with this last night. On their homework they put something along the lines of “Tortoise and Hare have a race” for their plot synopsis. That’s……..not exactly what we’re looking for. Today we fleshed out that idea, and talked about what makes an event important to a story. We ended up re-writing our summaries for the two stories we read so that they included all of the important events.
We then talked some about producers, decomposers, and consumers. Most of us correctly understood that without one of these types, ecosystems would begin to collapse. This is because energy is transferred in a cycle, and without one of these types, that chain, that connection, that cycle becomes severed.
This all leads to our next little mini topic: food webs and food chains!
Food chains and Food webs describe how energy is transferred within a group of organisms.
Tonight students have a simple handout talking about food webs that they should read and some questions to answer.
I then had a meeting to attend, so the students went to the computer lab with a substitute. They had some questions to answer:
What is a biome?
What types of biomes are there?
The students will be beginning a biome brochure project soon. They will have to create a brochure about the biome of their choice, just like a travel brochure. They will have to research their biome and tell us all about it.
so, tl;dr
Not much to do tonight!
Write a word problem for each of these equations. Solve it in the manner we have been:
36 + 48 =
25 – 7 =
Read and answer these questions about Food Webs:
And as always, read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter