We are back! I missed the students dearly, and it was so great to see everyone.
3rd quarter is one of our shortest, at only 8 and a half weeks. That means we really have to start out in earnest, and so we jumped right into it today, and we’ll be busy busy busy until the end.
In Math, we did some quick review of factoring as we will be working with adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions this quarter. Being able to find and recognize equivalent fractions will be essential, and knowing how factoring works is the first step in that.
Tonight students have a worksheet that asks them to find common factors of two numbers. They were given tiles and pop cubes to use to help them.
They will use the tiles and pop cubes to make different rectangles in order to find factors. For instance if they were told to use 8 tiles, the rectangles that they can make with 8 tiles are:
1 x 8
2 x 4
This means the factors of 8 are 1, 2, and 4
They will use this method to figure out the factors of the two numbers given, and then try to find the factors that the two numbers have in common. They should draw these factors in their rectangles, one above the other. We did some together as a class as examples, which can be found here:
In Language Arts we spent a good amount of time catching up with The Mysterious Benedict Society, and then going over our Case 21 assessments.
In Science this quarter we will be talking about weather, and doing a fairly large research paper on a weather phenomenon of our choosing. Tonight in their motivation reading books, students have a short selection that includes a research paper to read and some questions to answer. The selection is on pages 101-102, and the questions are on page 103-104. As always, the answers should be accompanied by reasoning!
When we got back to school, our aquarium appeared to be completely green! Tonight students should write down why they think the aquarium turned green. I gave them these hints:
The water isn’t green, but something IN the water is green.
What kind of organisms do we find in nature that are normally very green?
Mr. Potter accidentally left the aquarium light on for basically the entirety of the break (instead of the normal timer)
If you know the answer, don’t spoil it for anyone else!
so, tl;dr
one page of common factors using rectangle models:
P 101-104 in motivation reading with reasoning!
Why is our aquarium green? response
It’s great to be back!
-Mr. Potter