APTT and Parent-Teacher Conference Info at the bottom of the post!
Today students are very lucky. They received a day of no homework as a reward for their work on Boosterthon, and they chose today to take it. The ONLY thing they have to do tonight is their reading log.
We started off our day with a multiplication problem that students solved by breaking into smaller parts and distributing. They are getting MUCH better at this, and we now need to work on avoiding silly mistakes, and double-checking our work.
In Language Arts we talked more about main idea, and how it is the main point, the important idea, the essence of a passage. We looked at some more reading passages and used our main idea and supporting details organizer to identify the main idea.
In Science we took another quick vocab quiz and looked up some more vocabulary words. In many cases students understand how a process works, but lack the vocabulary to explain or express their understanding at an appropriate level. Science Vocabulary is something we will work on throughout the year. By the end of the year half of their science journal will look like a dictionary.
In math we talked again about addition and subtraction, and how they are inverse operations. This means you can undo one with the other. 7 – 4 = 3. Which means 3 + 4 = 7.
We also looked in detail at the operation of subtraction, and how it is about comparing numbers. This talk led us to a misconception that many students had:
If I subtract one number from another, I will end up with a smaller number.
This misconception is quite common at this point. It means students are thinking of subtraction simply as ‘take-away’. If you think in that way, it is quite difficult to understand that I can absolutely get a larger number using subtraction. Since subtraction is about finding difference, and comparing numbers, we can definitely get larger numbers when doing that.
so, tl;dr
Free day today as boosterthon reward
Read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
APPT and Parent-Teacher Conference info:
Academic Parent Teacher Teams are an opportunity for teachers and parents to work together on the same set of skills in order to progress students. The meeting is the evening of the 17th, which is next Thursday. I would very much appreciate seeing everyone there. I will probably bug you about this. Apologies in advance!
I have also set up a sign-up genius for parent teacher conferences. There is a link at the bottom, and also up at the top under ‘general links’. The majority of the times up right now are are either 7-8 in the morning, 4-5 in the afternoon, or 5-6 in the afternoon. If these do not work for you please let me know. If you give me a time that works for you, I will make it work for me. If you don’t sign up for one of these, I will probably also bug you about that. Apologies in advance!