We are on track to have a fantastic week!
We have been working lately on our calling out in class. We have a number line on our blackboard that goes from negative 5 to positive 5. When we call out, we go up a number, and when we go a while without calling out, we go down a number. if we end up in the positives, we have to practice being quiet at recess while we walk together. If we end up in the negatives, we get that many extra minutes of recess. Today we ended on NEGATIVE SEVEN! The students are really just doing fantastic in the room lately, and we are getting a ton done as a result. Make sure to congratulate your students if you get a chance!
In math, we are talking more about working with mixed numbers and how to move back and forth between those and improper fractions to make our problems as simple as possible. On yesterday’s homework, students were to convert their mixed numbers totally to improper fractions to perform their operations. We talked about that today, and how sometimes that just is not very efficient. If you have a huge number like 11 and 1/2 minus just 1 and 1/4th, then converting totally to an improper fraction just doesn’t make sense. And if we have to subtract a fractional part that is larger than the fractional parts that we started with (for instance 2 and 1/3 minus 1 and 2/3) then we don’t really have our number in a form that is simple to subtract 2/3. We definitely have the 1 and 2/3 inside of our 2 and 1/3, but it’s just not in a form that’s easily accessible to take.
In this case, we convert just ONE of our wholes to fractional parts. So we convert 2 and 1/3 to 1 and 4/3. Then it becomes simple to subtract our 1 and 2/3.
This is the focus of tonight’s homework, with just a simple seven problems for students to do. I expect them to be done well, with all work shown. The first two are done as examples here:
This is very similar to when we do subtraction with ungrouping. You can think of this as ungrouping a whole.
In Language Arts, I was a tad unimpressed with the summaries that I received for the poems from yesterday. As such, we are working more on ensuring that we do our best on our summaries and that they accurately reflect the content. We talked about looking at the first and last sentences in particular of paragraphs and stanzas and how they often give us a clue as to the main idea of that paragraph or stanza. To practice some of these skills, students should write a summary of a short excerpt from the story Black Beauty.
We also took our quiz on our cess/cede/ceed words. Hopefully we see good things from this. I’m hoping the extra work from writing the stories helps!
In science, we talked again about balanced and unbalanced forces, and watched the Bill Nye video on Atoms. This seemed to clear up some of our misconceptions and misunderstandings that we left with yesterday.
Students also have a short true/false worksheet from their science chapter on balanced and unbalanced forces.
So, tldr;
One math worksheet on subtracting fractions without converting the whole thing into an improper fraction.
One summary of a short bit of Black Beauty (paragraph by paragraph!)
One science worksheet on forces
It may seem like a good bit, but honestly the science and math should be short and sweet. I expect some time to be put into the summary, however!
And as always, let’s get that 35 minutes of reading done and reading logs signed!
Have a nice night, and see everyone tomorrow!
-Mr. Potter