What a great day!
We got quite a bit done. We started the day talking about the notes we took yesterday. Overall, the students did a fantastic job with these last night. Students had good notes about our passage, as well as questions that were answered by the notes they took. We shared what we came up with as far as questions go, and the students were perfectly capable of answering the questions with the notes they took. Success!
Tonight students have another short passage to read, and then take notes in their science journal just as they did last night. Once they have taken the notes, they should come up with questions for the left-hand side of the page, just like last night.
Next we revisited our discussion from last week about Chocolate Milk in school cafeterias.
We read two new articles about the debate, and then students were tasked with re-reading the articles, and adding to their chart of evidence/reasoning for or against banning chocolate milk.
Tonight if they have not finished, they should ensure they have at least five reasons for, and five reasons against banning chocolate milk. Last week they needed to come up with 3 for each, so tonight should be pretty easy to find two more for each side of the argument.
This week we will be starting a persuasive essay, using the reasons and evidence we have found so far. We will also begin talking about reasoning and logic.
At the end of the day we busted out our play money, and did a lot of work with subtraction, using manipulatives. Our goal here is to understand what is going on with the standard algorithm.
Some of the students are perfectly capable of doing something like 1.00 – 0.72, but then asking them to explain why they crossed out numbers and wrote tens in certain places and such can be challenging. Our goal is to give meaning to the process.
Tonight students have 2 problems to do USING THE PLAY MONEY. They have been told expressly that they are forbidden from using the standard algorithm with these two problems.
They should use the play money to first deal themselves the starting value. They then must exchange money with the bank (their math kit) in order to get their starting cash into a form that allows them to subtract the target amount. Each time they perform an exchange, they must also write this down.
As always, there are examples!
so, tl;dr
Read this passage, take notes!
Find two more points for each side of the flavored milk debate:
Do these two problems (USING THE MANIPULATIVES PLEAAASE)
And read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter