Homework Dec 1 (Mon)

I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving break!  Mine was full of food and naps.  It was wonderful.

 

Today we started talking about the order of operations.  I was pleasantly surprised that no students had weird ideas about PEMDAS or Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.  Basically please don’t tell your students these things, as they oftentimes give students mistaken ideas like they should do multiplication before division, or addition before subtraction.  Instead, we took a good amount of notes on the ‘big idea’ behind order of operations, which is that we do the more powerful operations first, unless we’re told implicitly otherwise.

Together we came up with the basic rankings of operations as follows:

multiplication and division are most powerful

addition and subtraction are less powerful

 

This is because multiplication and division are the inverse of each other, so they’re equally powerful.

Same with addition and subtraction.

So what about that ‘implicitly told otherwise’ thing?  That means before we do those, we should do anything in parenthesis, starting at the innermost, and working our way out.

 

Finally, there are two things we haven’t learned much about, but are worth mentioning: exponents and radicals.  These are both more powerful than basic multiplication or division, so these go before those operations.

Which means our final Order of Operations goes:

1. parenthesis
2. exponents and radicals
3. multiplication and division
4. addition and subtraction

The notes we took: OOPNotes

We talked about doing problems one step at a time, and looking at each step and determining what is the most powerful operation, moving from left to right.

 

Tonight students have a very simple page of exponents to do, along with two expressions to solve, using order of operations.

ExponentsDec1

In Language Arts, we talked at GREAT length about what Mr. Potter is looking for in our stories.  The students got a copy of my grading rubric for their Goldilocks stories, and they themselves graded their own paper, and a peer’s paper.  For many students, it looks like it finally got them to look at their own papers with a critical eye.  We will continue exercises that will get the students to critically examine their own work in the future.  I’d like for this to become a habit, and not something that we have to ask them explicitly to do.

Here is the rubric we used: Goldilocks Rubric

 

Tonight students have some text structure review.  They should read the two passages on pages 19-22 in their motivation reading book.  After each passage, they should draw a graphic organizer that corresponds to the text structure used for that story.

In Science, we took all of our plant data, and put it into excel.  The students then got to play around a good bit with creating graphs in excel.  We had a lot of fun messing around with the different settings, and thinking about what kind of graphs and what settings would represent our data the best.

Later we will add in temperature data and talk about comparing graphs, or maybe even plotting multiple data points on one graph!  It should be fun.

 

ok, so tl;dr

one page of exponents, and two problems to answer using order of operations

ExponentsDec1

Read pages 19-22 in motivation reading, and after each passage draw a graphic organizer that corresponds to the text structure used in each story.

As always, read and get your reading log signed!

 

Have a good one,

 

-Mr. Potter