Posted by kavery508 | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on May 4, 2015
You’re invited! Our End-of-Year Celebration will be held Friday, June 12, 9:30-10:15 in our Cafeteria. Similar to our Winter bash, we will be performing on the stage for family and friends, and we will remain after for photo opportunities and congratulations!
This week’s blogging project incorporates elements of technology instruction, reading, and writing. Students will select a poem from the many examples we’ve studied this year. They will compose an opinion writing piece with introduction, opinion, reasons, and a conclusion. The composition will require students to analyze poetry by using evidence from the text to report on speaker, tone, imagery, etc. Students will also produce an audio recording of themselves reciting the poem, and learn how to upload it to their blogs along with the text of their opinion writing. Finally, they will read and comment on each other’s work! After this week I’ll send home a link so you can view your child’s work in our online community. I am proud of how seriously they have treated issues of privacy and respect so far, and impressed by their technical abilities!
Our work with money and math continues this week. Students will continue to practice adding and writing amounts of bills and coins, and will learn to compare 2 or more amounts of money. This can get tricky if students are still learning coin values and totaling. For example, 7 coins does not make an amount greater than 2 coins if we’re comparing 7 pennies and 2 quarters. Although many of us pay for things with cards instead of cash, be on the lookout for opportunities to teach your child to total amounts of coins and bills and to estimate 1) if there is enough to buy something and 2) about how much change is due!
Handling money is a great example of the practical real-word application of math in our world. This week we will use money word problems to help us apply skills of computation, modeling, and logic. Consider the example in the picture above. Notice how it gives you several pieces of information and then requires you to think deeply about what the problem is asking and use modeling as a way to think through the problem. Students still struggle with these problems where there isn’t a clear solution write away. I’ve been teaching them to read and think about the whole problem for a minute, then 1) Re-read the first sentence. Are you able to draw a model of that information? 2) Do the same for the second sentence. Should you add to the first model? Start a second model? 3) Continue through the problem in this fashion. And always, always check that you have labels, correct math, and an answer sentence for each model.
I’m seeing a high error rate on most kids’ homework when it involves problem solving. This week’s homework includes problems where modeling is called for. Please help your child by making sure s/he follows the process and writes all that is needed. Homework is a time for practice and application, and in order to learn and remember these skills correctly, they’ve got to practice them correctly too. Thank you!
Our work with timelines and history has yielded great things! After analyzing various effective formats for showing information on timelines and using online mind-mapping software from bubbl.us to create new designs, students applied their learning by collaborating with peers to create timelines of past events that are important to them. Very smart!
