This morning we got extra PE from Mr. McClaney!
Last week we had a lockdown drill during our normal PE time, and the students missed out on the majority of their class. To make up for this, Mr. McClaney donated some of his time this morning to ensure the students got their fair share of one of their favorite specials.
Today we extended all of our talk of exponents to powers of ten, and the neat patterns we see when working with powers of ten. We took some notes, but the understandings here were very shaky, and we’ll be talking about them a LOT this week.
The basic ‘shortcut’ most of us were taught is that if you are multiplying by for example 10^3rd power, you move the decimal point three places to the right, and if you were multiplying by 10^-3, you would move the decimal point three places to the left, etc etc. It’s great for the students to know this, but I want them to really understand why this works, as opposed to simply remembering a shortcut.
The basics of this are if you are multiplying something like 12.47 x 10^2, then really you are multiplying each part of 12.47 by 100.
12.47 is made up of 1 ten, 2 ones, 4 tenths, and 7 hundredths
if we multiply 10 by 100, we get 1000
if we multiply 2 by 100, we get 200
.4 by 100 is 40,
.07 by 100 will give us 7
Thus we end up increasing each part of our original number by a factor of 100, which is really increasing it’s place value by two places.
The notes we started today:
Tonight students have a few problems to do working with powers of ten. Depending upon how this looks tonight it might be pretty much the same homework tomorrow, as I think we’ll keep working on this stuff until we really have a deep understanding of how and why this works.
In Language Arts we started talking about synonyms and antonyms. This is fairly straight-forward stuff, and it was nice to see some nodding heads after this morning!
Tonight students have a simple antonym worksheet to do, which I unfortunately seem to have lost the master for, and can not upload here at the moment. I apologize for this!
In Science we did some reviewing of the body systems we have talked about, and the students tonight have a little language arts reading selection dealing with bones:
Quite a short day!
so tl;dr
one set of powers of ten problems
One antonym worksheet
bones bones bones!
as always, read!
have a good one,
-Mr. Potter