I hope you all have plans to stay warm this weekend. Hopefully you have your Christmas preparation mostly done so you don't have to brave the cold to do too much shopping! Here is a little reading and YouTube-watching to give you something to do while you snuggle up on the couch. I wrote a blog article a couple of weeks ago about the different mutliplication strategies that you may see your child (especially if they are in 4th grade) trying with our new curriculum. I thought I would give you a glimpse at what long division strategies look like too. Fourth grade just completed their unit on division, and they did great! Fifth grade will be doing a review unit after break to see what they rememer about long division and also reviewing division when deicmals are involved. Please let me know if you have any question. I have also included a quick video that I shared with 4th grade families that will explain how the Partial Quotients method works. Ultimately, we still want kids to know how to do the standard, traditional algorithm that you and I learned in school, but sometimes in order to understand why that works, it helps to have a method that is more conceptual and based on better number sense ideas. Today was our second Engineering Challenge of the year. 3rd graders were building parachutes to save the astronauts. 4th graders were landing their astronauts on the moon. 5th graders were building robotic arms for space rovers to explore distant planets. A HUGE thank you to all of the parents that were able to come and help and join in on the fun. To add to the fun, 4th and 5th graders wanted to participate in the latest social-media craze by filming their own Mannequin Challenge. I'll have the videos of their actual work up by next week. In the meantime, enjoy this freeze frame of our work today.
And here is one last attempt to help you with your Christmas shopping. This time I am hoping you are planning to buy a couple of books for your child to read in the new year. Here are some of my favorite young adult fiction. (You might even enjoy reading some of these yourself!) Also below is a document that I helped created a few years ago to suggest higher-level series that are great ideas for gifted students needing to get hooked back into reading.
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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