Tomorrow is blanket fort and gum day!!
For our 1st jewel celebration, tomorrow students may bring a blanket and gum. We will make blanket forts with our blankets and desks, and then have DEAR time with them, while chewing our gum. It should be pretty fun!
So yes, they may bring a small comforter or blanket, and yes, they may bring gum!
Today, we had a really good talk about exponents. We focused on the idea that exponentiation is raising a base to a given power by multiplying the base by itself an exponent number of times.
We also talked about the pattern we see in exponents, and used that to extrapolate something raised to the power zero, and to the power of negative 1.
Exponent notes: ExponentNotes
Tomorrow we will take a quick quiz on order of operations and I hope we can move on, as the students picked this stuff up quickly.
Tonight students have another sheet of equations to evaluate. It also has two of the ’24’ problems at the bottom. I love math puzzles!
In Language Arts we talked a LOT about author’s purpose, and why they would choose a particular text structure for their work. Tonight, students have another collection of short paragraphs to analyze. They should give me this information about each paragraph:
1. Type of text structure used
2. Graphic organizer presenting the information
3. I believe the author used …. because…..
For number 3, I don’t want them to justify their answer for number 1. I want them to explain why an author would pick that particular structure. Why would they choose problem and solution? Why would they choose sequence? What are they writing about that makes that text structure work best?
As an example, here is the first one (that we did together)
1. Sequence
2. (graphic organizer here)
3. I believe the author used sequence because they are teaching something, and the best way to do that is to tell someone how to do something step by step.
In Science we talked again about DNA and watched a quick animation that explained how DNA is replicated into RNA, and then used by ribosomes to create new proteins.
We also had a discussion about learned versus inherited traits, and it seems that the students already have a good grasp of the idea that you inherited your eyes and your chin from your parents, but not the fact that you may or may not like baseball.
so, tl;dr
One last set of order of operations problems:
One set of text structures, answering the question “Why would the author use THIS text structure?”
also read!
P.S. I apologize if my request yesterday that you allow your student to do their text structures homework independently was frustrating. I understand completely! But I appreciate your cooperation, and I’ll try not to do it again!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter