Language arts enrichment began this week for 4th and 5th graders. I am looking forward to working with 4th grade every day during the first and third semester and 5th grade Monday through Friday all year. We will be reading and writing, as well as doing projects and literature circles. One of the things I try to do each week is work with the kids to learn the origins of English by studying Greek and Latin root words. This is a great way for the kids to increase their vocabulary and work on seeing patterns in spelling in our language. You might think we are all a little strange when I share with you how much the kids LOVE this part of the week! We brainstorm words with the root of the week, play a game, and do a little reinforcing work. For example, 4th grade's first word this week was ped (meaning foot) so we found words like pedicure, pedestrian, quadruped, and more. 5th graders math students are hard at work continuing their work on advanced number sense in math. We have been working on vocabulary related to factors/multiples and prime/composite. We tackled determining greatest common factors. As an extension this week, we learned about Goldbach's conjecture (see if they remember what he is famous for!) Today we learned how to find the prime factors using factor trees and had fun with creating factor trees in our math notebooks (see picture examples below.) We will continue work on this for one more week learning divisibility rules, reviewing order of operations, exponents, and scientific notation with our test on or about 9/15. While 5th grade works with numbers, 4th grade math students have been dealing with shapes. We are continuing our work with geometry including our understanding of lines/line segments/rays, angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and polygons. While the shapes themselves are not hard to learn, knowing how to name and label these always proves a bit tricky. We took our first quiz of the year today - look in Friday Folders for how your child did or ask them for their copy. Some students brought their quiz home today in order to fix/finish for improved thinking (and an improved grade.) This quick geometry unit will be completed with our unit test on Thursday, 9/11.
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Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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