Welcome back everyone!  I hope you all had a great track out.  I know that you were all sad to see your little ones head back to school.  I am sure you loved having them in your house 24 hours a day.  Definitely.

 

Today was fantastic honestly. Aside from a few calling out issues,  the students came right back in and we fell into our normal routine.

 

We spent the morning exploring the process for dividing numbers.

Before we left for track-out, I realized that many students understand the PROCESS for doing long divison, but don’t actually understand what is going on ‘under the hood’ so to speak.  We will take this week to explore that and ensure everyone understands what is actually going on, as opposed to memorizing a simple procedure.

We used money to help illustrate the process.  We talked about how if you had 12 dollars (one ten dollar bill and two one dollar bills) how you would split this up among 3 people.  In it’s current state of one ten and two ones, it is impossible to split up the money.  So we have to break our 10 dollars down into ones first, and then distribute ones to each person.  We talked about what was going on, and came up with this process:

We illustrate 12 divided by 4 in this way:

1 ten                     2 ones                                    split among 4 people

1.  We hand each person 0 tens.

2.  We have 1 ten left.

3.  We turn our ten into ten ones.

4.  We now have 12 ones.

5.  We hand each person 3 ones.

 

The students are to use this method to split up three different amounts of money among different numbers of people.  We did the first one as a group, and you can see that here: DivisionProcessMar23

For the second and third problems, they should follow this method and provide the step by step just as they did above.

The second problem is to divide 68 dollars among four people. (6 tens and eight ones)

The third problem is to divide 96 dollars among 8 people (9 tens and 6 ones)

 

We then went over our newest list of vocabulary words.  This week we are working with junct/join/jug words.  The students should write and use each word correctly in a sentence, for a total of ten sentences.  Unlike normal, this is due tomorrow as opposed to two days from now.

We spent the rest of the day going over our Language Arts Case 21 assessments from last quarter.

A few things that really jumped out at me about our students’ performance on this test:

For the first 24 questions (there were 45 questions total) the students did very well.  This test took the majority of our students a full three hours.  This means that for the first half of that, the students were doing very well.

For the last 21 questions, the students on average did very poorly. (This is not all, but just average).  The questions were not significantly more difficult during the second half of the assessment.  I also noticed that many students stopped ‘proving’ their work during the second half, and stopped underlining passages and generally using good test taking strategies.

This strikes me as a major stamina problem.  If the students cannot focus and stay focused for the full three hours, then what they actually know and can do is not going to show up on a test like this.  As they go on, they will only encounter more tests like this, and their work in general will require that they can read for great lengths and remain focused on a passage or book.  This was something that I honestly did not work on nearly as much as I should have during the 3rd quarter.  We will definitely be addressing this by adding back stamina reading into our daily routine.  In this way I hope to build the students up to a point where they CAN sit there and stay focused on the task at hand for an extended period.

 

It is also imperative that the students truly are doing their reading each night.  This also helps with stamina, and helps expose them to just a ton of different things.  People who read more simply know more.

 

Students also had meetings with our guidance counselor Mrs. Carter today to talk about electives and their assigned courses for Middle School.  If you have any questions about this please feel free to contact myself or Mrs. Carter.  The students took their course selection sheets home with them, and they need to be signed and turned back in ASAP!

I am looking forward to a productive quarter, and am excited about getting all of our students ready for middle school!

 

tldr;

Math homework: 3 problems done in the format we talked about in class

Language Arts: 10 sentences for our new words.

 

Middle School: Look over the course selection sheet, fill out what needs filling out, and bring that back!

 

Have a good one!

 

-Mr. Potter