Tomorrow is Taki and Chips day!
For our celebration for our silver medal, students may bring in some takis/chips/a snack and we will have a little bit of game time at the end of the day tomorrow.
We spent a very long time discussing word problems today. While much of the class is getting it, some students are still having trouble visualizing what is going on within a story problem.
I can’t stress enough how important it is that students have a definite plan in their head before they tackle a word problem. This is why we are asking students to go about word problems in a certain way, and to get them used to going back and forth between equations and word problems on their own. Students should be asking themselves these questions:
What is the question asking me?
What information do I have?
What can I figure out based on the information I have?
Tonight students have a multi-step word problem to create on their own. The following set of equations should be the way in which the problem is solved:
1 + 2 =
5 + 3 =
8 – 5 =
So it looks like we are first combining 1 of something and 2 of something else. Then combining 5 of something with 3 of something. And then either taking 5 away from 8 of something OR comparing 8 of something to 5 of something…….
Our science discussion was filled with vaults today!
I told the students that they were going to be locked into a vault after a nuclear war with their group. Each group member would be allowed to bring one thing of their choice. The vault has access to sunlight, clean running water, and a basic bathroom. The vault is airtight.
On the first round, students all chose video games or ipods/tablets, etc. I then acted out what would happen to each unfortunate group as they ran out of oxygen.
In the next round students brought plants (yay!). They didn’t run out of oxygen quite as quickly, but eventually the plants died off for some reason……
Eventually some groups picked up on the fact that they would need a whole slew of organisms to survive in their vault. They would need something to produce food and oxygen for themselves. They would also need something to break down waste and other things back into nutrients, so that the plants’ soil would not eventually become barren.
Tonight students should answer this question:
What ended up being important in order to survive in the vault? What things did the groups who survived bring? Why were those items important?
We also talked about food webs, and made some more of those in class. Tonight students should make their own food web. The food web should be realistic, and made up of real, currently living, organisms. It must contain at minimum:
2 producers
2 consumers
2 decomposers
We also began writing some stories today. Students had previously come up with a character of their own design. We had used a character trait chart to design what type of character they would be. We had also made story maps to help us begin our writing.
Today we talked about how establishing a setting is an important start to a story, and helps immerse our reader in our world. It also helps them to create a picture of what is going on in their heads.
We wrote a quick introduction paragraph describing the setting of our story. We then broke into pairs and did TAG with our partners:
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Tonight students should RE-WRITE their setting paragraph, trying to improve it based on their own ideas, or based on the questions/suggestions they received from their partner.
SO, tl;dr:
Write a multi-step word problem that would be solved by the following equations:
1 + 2 =
5 + 3 =
8 – 5 =
Answer this question about our vault exercise:
What ended up being important in order to survive in the vault? What things did the groups who survived bring? Why were those items important?
Draw a food web that contains two producers, two consumers, and two decomposers
Re-write introduction that establishes a setting for their story.
And as always, read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter