Another Tuesday with school! We only have this week and next before Case 21s, which is insane.
Today we talked about ways to identify addition, subtraction, and multiplication word problems. We discussed again how addition is combining, subtraction is difference, and multiplication can be a few different things that involve groups of a certain size, or repeated even groups.
Tonight students have a set of word problems involving fractions. They need to think about what the problem is asking them to do: combine? find the difference? And then perform the correct operation. All too often on assessments and homework students simply ‘tunnel vision’ to the numbers in a problem, pick an operation seemingly at random, and perform that operation. We will be working on putting some fore-thought into our decisions and working on our reading comprehension with math problems.
In Language Arts we began writing our introduction paragraphs to our research paper. Students should be wrapping up their research for the most part, and beginning on their first rough draft. For the rest of the week we will be writing and re-writing this introduction, and get to the ‘meat’ of the paper next week.
We also talked again about figurative language, especially personification. Personification is giving a non-human, sometimes inanimate object human qualities or characteristics. Tonight students have a list of sentences, where they are to identify the object being personified, and then explain the use of personification.
In Science we talked about how for the next week or so we will be following the Iditarod race (www.iditarod.com) and predicting the weather along the trail. We looked at the different weather data points, and talked about how Meteorologists use this data to make their predictions. Each group got one piece of information, and they made a prediction of what the weather might look like. As we added more and more data, we discovered that our predictions no longer made sense, and we had to adjust them. Eventually with all of the data (temperature, air pressure, wind speed, direction, and radar/satellite imagery) we agreed on some predictions. Tonight students should write in their own words their predictions for the weather based on the data.
Students also received a weather DAZE passage that they should do tonight.
so, tl;dr
Math word problems: Word Problems March 10th
Personification sheet: personification-worksheet
The weather on the Iditarod trail
Weather DAZE passage: Rain_Daze
as always, read for 35 minutes!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter