Did I mention we are not done yet?
So we have started talking about exponents and radicals! A constant problem with students is they forget that 3^2 is 3 * 3, and instead mistakenly believe it means 3 * 2. So today we chanted over and over “3 squared is not 3 times two”.
Tonight for homework students have a set of exponent problems to solve.
We are also trying to pinpoint some weaknesses we have individually in mathematics and get those sorted before we leave for middle school. For this, some students also have some subtraction homework to do tonight. Those that have this homework know who they are.
In Language Arts we are quickly reviewing a lot of strategies and things we talked about during the year. Our reasoning is getting MUCH better and today we took a quick assessment with a non-fiction text where we had to explain our answer choices. Overall I was very happy with the student’s performance on this.
We then spent a good amount of time talking about economy, and Wally and the Walnuts. Many students are confusing the idea of money (a medium of exchange) with what the money represents (standard of value).
In our story, everyone trades in Walnuts. That is the standard of value. It’s something that everyone uses as a standard to determine value for barter and trade. In the U.S. it was gold up until a little while ago. Hence, the ‘gold standard’. In our story we have a ‘walnut standard’.
Now we don’t carry bricks of gold around with us, and they got tired of carrying around buckets of walnuts in the story. So they develop a medium of exchange to represent the buckets of walnuts. They use little pieces of wood with ‘W’s on them. In our country we use little pieces of paper and metal with pictures of dead presidents on them.
Tonight students got a new chapter of Wally and the Walnuts to read, along with two questions to answer:
1. What is competition?
2. Is competition good or bad? Give at least two reasons for your answer.
so, tl;dr
exponents!
subtraction if you need to!
Read W&TW next chapter:
Answer two questions about it:
1. What is competition?
2. Is competition good or bad? Give at least two reasons for your answer.
And as always, read!
-Mr. Potter