TOMORROW IS PICTURE DAY!!!
Yay our classroom is clean again!
So we finally got our library squared away. We came up with our own way of categorizing our non-fiction books after a trip to the library to see how Mrs. Wall organizes her non-fiction books.
It feels much better now that our students are not constantly under the threat of being buried under a teetering pile of books.
Next we continued our discussion of comparing and contrasting things. Tonight students should take their Tale of the Ngiri and the Tortoise and the Hare story, and compare and contrast the two.
We then spoke a LOT more about producers and consumers. Some students have gotten quite confused, and have the idea that consumers are only those animals that eat other animals.
We had the discussion that everything that eats something else (doesn’t produce their own food, like producers), is a consumer!
We also watched a neat video on some other types of producers that *don’t* use photosynthesis to produce their own food.
Tonight students have a sheet where they need to identify producers, consumers, and decomposers. Hopefully with some practice and some discussion tomorrow, we can clear up some misconceptions.
We then read some of the Mysterious Benedict Society and found out that Mr. B has an evil twin! BUM BUM BUUUUUUUUMMMM!!!
Finally, we shared our word problems from last night. The students did an excellent job with this, and I was happy to see them capable of taking an equation and working it into a word problem. Essentially they were able to take a number sentence and translate it into a real world situation.
We analyzed the language that we used in our addition word problems vs. our subtraction word problems. We found that addition word problems tended to use similar language: phrases like ‘together’ and ‘altogether’ and ‘both’ or ‘more’ or ‘combine’ were prevalent.
Based on this, we decided that we can define addition as combining things, and when we see things being put together and being combined, we are seeing addition.
We had a similar discussion with our subtraction problems and found that subtraction can be TWO possible things. It could be take away:
I had 5 toys and Tommy took two of them. How many do I have now?
5 toys – (take away) 2 toys = 3toys
I have 3 toys now
OR it could be the difference between two values; comparing two values:
I have 5 toys. Tommy has 2 toys. How many more toys do I have than Tommy?
5 toys – (the difference between) 2 toys = 3 toys
I have 3 toys more than Tommy
Tonight students should use this newfound knowledge to write a new word problem. This time, it is a two step word problem. They should look at this following set of equations, and write a word problem that would be solved by these two equations.
31 + 14 = 45
45 – 10 =
So in their word problem they should be combining two values (31 & 14) and then taking away something from that combination, or comparing it to something else.
Understanding what the operations actually do and being able to go back and forth from an equation to real world ideas is extremely important.
SO, tl;dr
Compare and contrast the Tortoise and the Rabbit with the Tortoise and the Antelope
Identify the producers, consumers, and decomposers, and answer some questions:
Write a two-step word problem that would be solved by the following equations:
31 + 14 = 45
45 – 10 =
And as always, READ READ READ!!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
P.S. TOMORROW IS PICTURE DAY!!