Today was a very good Monday.
We got a ton of stuff done. This morning we did a lot of work with adding fractions and finding equivalent fractions. We discussed that in order to find equivalent fractions, we can multiply any fraction by a form of one. Multiplying by one will not change the value of our fraction, but it will change what our fraction looks like. For instance if we multiply a fraction like 1/2 by 2/2 (which is equal to 1), we end up with 2/4. This may look different because we have cut our fraction into 4 pieces, but it is still equivalent to 1/2. This make sense, as multiplying anything by one will not change its value (multiplicative identity property).
Tonight students have some fraction addition problems to solve. Each fraction comes with a square that they should use to draw the fraction. They should also show me what form of one they use to multiply their fractions by in order to find common denominators.
Here are some examples:
And the homework:
EquivFractionAddingHomeworkFeb9
In Language Arts we had quite a few new books added to our classroom library. We put these away and everyone got a chance to pick out one or two they would like to read. We also took a look at what books everyone is interested in reading for the North Carolina Children’s Book awards. Each student will be tasked with reading 3 of the books on the list on their own, and we will read two books together in class. This means they will have read the requisite 5 books so that they can vote in March. The book list and more information can be found here.
Tonight students have a ‘maze’ passage. (this is sometimes called a ‘daze’ passage). Essentially it is a passage where specific words in the passage are removed, and replaced with three possible choices. The students circle the words that make sense in the passage. We will be having one of these each week to preview our science reading for the following day.
In Science we made our own little clouds inside a jar. We filled the jar with warm water, and talked about how just water vapor does not a cloud make. The water vapor would need to come together and condense, so we added ice to the top of the jar to cool the water vapor. Still no clouds.
This is when we found out that clouds are formed when water vapor condenses, but it has to condense onto SOMETHING, which in the atmosphere are called cloud condensation nuclei. These are tiny little particles in the atmosphere upon which water condenses, coming together to form clouds.
We added some cloud condensation nuclei to our jars in the form of some burnt matches. This put small smoke particles in our jars upon which our water could condense, and form tiny clouds.
Tonight students have a simple sheet asking about the experiment we performed:
Tomorrow we’ll make some different clouds!
so, tl;dr
One set of adding fractions problems:
EquivFractionAddingHomeworkFeb9
examples if you need them: AddingFractionsExample
Maze passage previewing tomorrow’s science passage:
One sheet reviewing our cloud experiement:
As always, read for 35 minutes!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter