Place Value Detectives

We started our first math project of the year today.  After covering several concepts in place value over the past month, it was time for the students to put their knowledge to the test and apply what they have learned.

The project is called Place Value Detectives.  Students become "detectives" and have to use their knowledge of place value to solve "crimes". Because of copyright I can't post the project on the blog, but your child should have their project in their binder if you would like to review it with them.

We will do several of these types of projects over the course of the school year. While there is a lot of math being done in these projects, there is also a lot of reading. Students are required to read all directions and follow them explicitly to be able to complete the work.  Students are able to use each other and myself if they get stuck at any given time.  Any time we are working on these types of projects, most of the work will be done in class, with the understanding that if the students still has work to complete before the due date, then it will need to be completed at home.

After working on this project today, I can tell you that the students were so excited!  They told how much fun they were having doing math and how much better it was than doing practice problems!  Always a win in my book!

Number Forms Notes

Today we created a foldable for our math journal that includes the 4 forms a number may take.  Students in 4th grade are required to be able to write numbers in various forms and transfer them back and forth between forms.
The Common Core State Standard that we are focusing on for this week is is 4.NBT.2 which states

Read and write multi-digit whole numbers using base-ten numerals, number names, and expanded form. Compare two multi-digit numbers based on meanings of the digits in each place, using >, =, and < symbols to record the results of comparisons.

We will break this standard down into it's pieces and focus on a different part for the first few days of the week.

These are the notes from class today.

We also discussed the patterns we found from completing the How Many Ways activity that students completed over the weekend.  I was very impressed with level of academic conversation we were able to have about to have about this activity.

In social studies, we are learning about the 4 hemispheres of the world. We are identifying the continents and oceans on each hemisphere.