What an awesome day today was!! We began our first STEM Engineering Challenge. Actually, I should say what a great week it was! Monday was like Christmas morning as all of the supplies I ordered got delivered and organized. Here are a couple of shots from what my classroom looked like Monday afternoon... Thanks to amazing parent volunteers, excellent teamwork (seriously almost NO scrabbles between teams!) and some perseverance, all three math classes jumped right in to their work. Third grade worked on catapults for pom-poms with the goal of getting shooting your pom-pom as far as possible. Fourth grade built straw rockets with the goal of consistently hitting a target five feet away. Fifth grade is building airbag landers for their rover (EGG!) to land safely from a six foot drop. Keep in mind that they get no instructions on how to accomplish this. The students get the challenge, two teammates, a list of optional supplies (that they must "purchase" with their 200 points,) a poster to brainstorm on and they get to work. Tomorrow we'll finish the design/test/rebuild phase, complete our final tests for the offical points tally, and reflect on their task, as well as their group dynamics. All the pictures I took yesterday are on the photos page of the website so check them out. http://traceybean.weebly.com/photos.html That wasn't the only thing we did all week. Fourth grade math students have been learning about angles all week. We started the week reviewing how to name them (acute, obtuse, reflex...) and mid-week began measuring angles with different types of protractors. For a little bit of fun and exercise, we had a relay race for our review of angle descriptions. Here are a couple of photos from Monday. You can tell by the blurriness how competitive and speedy they were! One of the shifts mathematical learning with the Colorado Standards is that students understand how to use and manipulate number lines. As third grade has been exploring fractions, we have been also making sure to relate fractions to number lines. This last week our focus was on understanding how whole numbers, mixed numbers, and improper fractions (or as I like to call them "fractions greater than 1") all line up on number lines. We had some fun working with partners to create number lines, break them into fractional units, and label them while writing on the table. Something about writing on the table makes any topic more interesting!
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Next week will be our first STEM project (January 28 & 29 for those of you that volunteered to help!) so I have a feeling next week's blog will focus on my math groups experiences. This week I'll catch you up on what language arts/creativity groups are up to in Knowledge Peak. This week or next week depending on your child's homeroom teacher's schedule, you will find your child's mid-year report for their ALP (Advanced Learning Plan) in Friday Folders. Students completed a self-reflection on one side and a teacher (me for math and their homeroom teacher for reading) filled out the back with their thoughts at this point in the year. Please remember that this is just a check-in to see where your child might need to focus their energy in the second semester so that they can be considered completing their goal by the end of the year. Please let me know if you have any questions! 5th grade language arts/creativity kids have just begun a long-term project focused on learning to read nonfiction and do research. Your child has now brainstormed a topic and narrowed it to their top choice to complete an essay and a presentation project. Topics are ranging from the Borneo rainforests to Steven Hawking to requirements/qualifications to become president to necessary elements to colonize Mars. These projects are not due until Spring Break so we will spend many weeks first doing research and then working on how to synthesize that research into a coherent essay complete with citations and a bibliography. Take a minute to ask your child what their topic is and what their next due date it. One of the huge pieces of this project is learning to budget time and energy for a long-term project and meet deadlines along the way. Another element of this project is learning to use Google classroom and Google docs to complete work. Many of the middle school and high school teachers use Google Classroom for all student work so this will help them learn how to get assignments and submit work. Below is the outline of the project so you know what your child is expected to do (they have the due dates in Google Classroom where we are housing all of our work.) Fourth grade language arts/creativity is completing our last week together until March next week. They have been independently reading a biography on a Colorado history person. We have been learning and sharing about Mary Long Elitch and John Wesley Powell and Margaret Brown and more. Students had three tasks: read the book, write the ABC's of your person, complete a choice project. Most of them are in good shape. Please check with your child and see what they still need to complete. We will be working all week in class, but they may need to spend some time in the evenings this week finishing up since these are due on Thursday, January 28. Below is the requirements sheet that the students got: Updates this week on where each of the math classes are at in our studies... Third grade is continuing our study of fractions. This last week, we made sure they had secured the idea of unit fractions (fractions with a numerator of 1,) and then we worked on decomposing fractions into unit fractions. For example, seeing that 3/4 is 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 - the basics of adding and subtracting fractions. This next week we'll continue looking at fractions on number lines and real-world uses of fractions. The lessons I am using are from the Eureka curriculum which is one that the district is considering for adoption next year. Eureka is published by a nonprofit company called Great Minds. If you are interested in taking a deeper look at this curriculum, take a peak at http://greatminds.net/maps/math/home where you can see everything they provide for free. In February, third grade will be learning geometry from the other curriculum the district is considering which is called EnVision 2.0. Fourth grade began exploring long division and the strategies that students can use to first understand the concepts behind division and eventually learn the traditional method. I know parents sometimes get frustrated with the methods we use to teach students algorithms for the basic computation. Please trust that the goal of teachers now is not to simply teach students to memorize steps to solve a problem but to truly understand why the math works and why the standard (traditional) algorithms work. With that said, 4th grade spent the week exploring the concept of division as equal grouping, repeated subtraction, and the inverse of multiplication. Below you will see their best attempts based on basic understanding to divide 253 by 11. Rest assured, they will learn more efficient methods this week. Fifth grade math students began our unit on fractions this week. By the end of this unit, we will have mastered computations with fractions and mixed numbers including subtraction, addition, and multiplication. We'll cover division in a later unit this year too. This last week we had some fun exploring equivalent fractions with fraction tiles and fraction circles. The students reviewed greatest common factors, least common multiples, and converting mixed numbers to improper fractions and back again since all of those skills will be required in the coming weeks. We learned how to create fractions in their simplest form (the form that ALL answers must be in from here on out.) Below are some shots of our equivalent fraction explorations and math graffiti. Welcome back to the 2016 portion of our school year! One quick note, Math Olympiad 3 is on Tuesday next week for 4th and 5th graders so please try to make sure your child is in math that day since those contests cannot be made up. Here are a few things that went on our first week back... Third Grade math students are participating with me in piloting our new math curriculum choices so for the next two months we won't be using our normal Every Day Math (orange) books. I am on the adoption committee for the district, and we have narrowed it down to two. This month, we'll be learning fractions from Eureka Math. This week we completed some of the lessons. Today we created a "Fraction Museum" where students had to take a fractional unit and given paper, water, string, and playdough to demonstrate how to create equal pieces to demonstrate their fractions. It was fun, and there were some mistakes we had to fix in the end. Here is some picture evidence of the kids' work (more pictures on the photos page.) 5th Grade language arts/creativity is hard at work again to finish up our last poem for our poetry unit. The students used their math and technology skills to write a poem that reflected what they add up to. Below are a few of the students' examples of what they feel makes them "100% Me." Next week we will leave poetry behind and begin our Peak Projects - nonfiction reading, writing, researching, and creating projects that will take us the next couple of months to create and present. In Friday Folders this week, if your child is in my math class, you will find a letter for you that explains how your child can login and how you can keep tabs on their progress in http://www.XtraMath.org This program is something that we do in class weekly to practice basic math facts. What I love about this site is that it makes the students pass their addition facts then their subtraction and finally their multiplication. Many gifted students THINK they are beyond the need for addition facts. Many of them have found that is not the case. I have written on your child's letter what their % progress is in the topic they are on, and I have told the kids that at this point if they are still on addition (especially in 5th grade!) after 1/2 a year of practice, they need to be spending homework time doing more on this site so that they can pass. Please take a minute to chat with your child about their progress and determine what two nights of the week they would be willing to sit for less than 5 minutes each to do some extra sessions in XtraMath. The better they know their basic facts, the easier more complex math is in class. Fourth graders are finding this to be especially true now that they are in units covering long multiplication and long division problems. Thanks for your help with this necessary piece of math learning! |
Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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