Week 4

Can you believe it’s been four full weeks? Last Thursday, you should have received your student’s midterm evaluation. We are over halfway through our first quarter (now there’s a problem involving fractions!).

Students should be bringing home their red plastic folder every night in lieu of the traditional school agenda.  This is our way of communicating with each other.  The pocket “Left at Home” is for papers from the day, and any school or PTO communication. The pocket “Keep Right Here” should have our weekly calendar, and the occasional homework page, usually the G.R.O.W. from Mrs. Curry, but sometimes a math paper. 

Students have hopefully been bringing work home that we’ve been doing in our math classroom.  Many of these papers will appear unfinished.  Please do not be worried!  We are doing SO MUCH MATH in school, that we often are only able to complete part of a paper in class.  Unless I have specifically noted, unfinished papers are NOT homework.  This is especially true for the MATH SPRINTS – where there is an “A” paper and a “B” paper.  These are timed exercises (much like sprints in track).  The “A” sprint is done “cold turkey” with no preparation.  After one minute, we look at the correct answers and have a “Math Talk.”  What did we notice?  Any patterns?  What are some things we could do to make sense of the problems, and therefore, help us go a little faster the second time around?  We talk for ten minutes or so, do some sample problems, and then try Sprint B.  Nearly every student makes progress between A and B, and we all celebrate our improvement.  The sprints are not written with the expectation that students should be able to finish 44 problems in 1 minutes.  If that actually happened with a student each time I gave a sprint, I would wonder what he/she is doing in 5^th grade!

Last week we continued multiplying decimals by whole numbers, and this week, we’ll begin dividing decimals by whole numbers.  Please continue to “quiz” your child in short bursts (in the car on the way to practice is always a good time) the multiplication and division facts.  9 x 7, 12 x 12, 81/9 and so on.