Learning Comes Alive!

What a wonderful surprise I had when I looked out our classroom’s window yesterday! I spied some familiar looking, hard working botanists! Mr. Bar, our science expert, helped our class plant sunflower, marigold, and corn seeds in our school garden.They used shovels to dig holes in the garden. The students also learned about not digging too deep, so that the plants are able to grow and survive. If you dig too deep the plant can’t grow because it isn’t getting enough energy from the sun. Mr. Bar also explained that when you plant the seeds in the ground you can’t pat the dirt down too hard or too tight because the stem can’t get out of the soil! After planting the seeds, they watered the ground. They learned that plants need the exact right amount of sun, water, and soil to grow. Too much of any one thing can cause the plant not to grow!

Garden Garden 2 Garden 3 Garden 4

Click here for a wonderful plant website! Learn about seed growth, parts of a flower, seed dispersal, and plant identification.

Show What You Know!

Yasmin blew us away yesterday, when she used an open number line to solve the following problem:

452 = n + 323

Her strategy was awesome and she was able to show and explain her work! Good mathematicians can always defend where they got their answer!

Show your work!Nancy, Francisco, and Alaina did a great job showing their work on the following word problems. I like how they used numbers and words to explain their thinking! Can you aspire to make your work like theirs? What strategies can you borrow from these learners?

Show your work 2

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Show your work Alaina

Math in Action!

We took our whole class math block to a whole new level this week! We played “Agree, Argue, Aspire”, worked in teams and independently, took our fraction knowledge deeper, and capped it all off with multiplication Jeopardy! Our class was focused and engaged all week long, and you have made me so proud!

We studied Karmyn’s work on her practice EOG test. Check out how she tried three different strategies before getting an answer with which she was confident! Karmyn’s work showed us that she can truly persevere when things get tough. Her example gave us a lot to aspire to!

Don’t be afraid to try more than one strategy!

Never be afraid to start all over!

Here we are studying Karmyn’s work and deciding what we agreed with, what we wanted to argue with, and what we could aspire to do in our own work!

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If you’d like to try out multiplication Jeopardy at home click on the picture below. Get your family involved! See if you can beat your siblings and parents! Remember your good sportsmanship. Even though the girls were our big winner our boys acted like true gentlemen!

More fraction games!

Alaina helped me realize today that I had never put the amazing Balloon Pop fraction ordering game on our blog! Thanks Alaina!

Remember, the shaded areas of each balloon represent the fractions. Work from the smallest to biggest fractions popping the balloons! Click the game below.

Here’s a new game to check out! This game has you estimate where fractions fall on a number line based on the fraction’s size. Remember to ask yourself what we practiced in class, “Is this more or less than a half?”

You can find more fractions by clicking on this previous blog post, “No not Fractions! March 20, 2014. 

Rosie the Riveter Returns!

I noticed something interesting on my favorite nonfiction reading site for kids. Newsela.com is a great website that contains many current news articles written for students. When you click on the left of the site you can change the Lexile level of the article. A lower Lexile level will be easier to read and a higher level will be more difficult, probably on a middle school level. On Newsela I found this great article, The Original Rosie the Riveter had the Right Name for the Job! The article discusses the same Rosie we learned about in Andrea Beaty’s book, Rosie Revere Engineer! Take a few minutes to read and enjoy this article. Adjust the Lexile level on the left if the text seems too difficult or simple!


Here’s one of our favorite pages from Rosie Revere Engineer! (If you want to learn about powerful, smart women then check out this book!)

Fraction Long Jump!

“What’s all that noise?!” Mrs. Paul’s class wondered. It was the sound of 17 long jumpers comparing fractions. We started at zero on our number line and tried to see who could jump the most whole numbers. Alaina jumped the farthest for the girls, 2 whole spaces and 3/4 of the next space. Antwan jumped the farthest for the boys, 3 whole spaces and 1/8 of the next space! Most of us were able to jump over two whole spaces (and those of us who couldn’t did not have jumping shoes on today!) We are going to use our data to create a  line plot graph. How should we organize the scale for our graph?

fraction jumps 5 fraction jumps! Fraction jumps 2

We will talk deeper about equivalent fractions tomorrow. Here is a quick video reminder of what we have discussed:

Exploring Fractions

Fractions

We have been exploring fractions for the past 15 days (wow, that’s half of a month!) I think our favorite fraction activities involve chocolate bars! There’s no better way to explore twelves than with a delicious Hershey bar!

Today, we played a game that asked us to put fractions in order from smallest to biggest. Thinking about those candy bar pieces really helped us out! You can find this fraction game here!

fractions 5 fractions 1 fractions 2 fractions 3fractions 4