Division Strategies

As we continue to work on division strategies in class, I wanted to share with you what you might see your student doing when solving a division problem.  I took one of our problem of the days from this week and went through each part explaining how students solve it and addressed some of the discussions we've had in class. I hope this helps explain what we are doing.  If you have more questions, please let me know!

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!

Candy Rush

On Wednesday we stared a new project  called "Candy Rush".  Students were given a "bag" of candy that looked like this.

Then using this sheet,

they had to find the total value of their bag of candy.  This activity is continuing to work their knowledge of place value and the value of a digit in a given place value.  Then they were given three slips of paper to write their name, the value of their candy, and the number of pieces of candy in their bag.  As a group the students had to then decide a way to display the data on a sheet of paper.
Here are some of tables.

Today (Friday) and on Monday, students used their their data to answer some analyzing questions about the numbers and data their team displayed on their table. We will be displaying our tables in the hallway next week, so make sure you stop by and check out our work!

How Many Ways

Wednesday and Thursday we worked on building numbers in different ways using place value blocks.
Wednesday, we built the number 52 as a class with base 10 blocks.  First we built the number with the least amount of blocks as possible - 5 tens and 2 ones.
Then we discussed other ways to build the number by trading in tens for ones.  We ultimately came up with 6 ways to build 52.

 Here is our chart where we kept track of our different ways.

Then we discussed any patterns we saw with the chart. We discussed how the the number of tens decreased by one and as the ones increased by 10.  We also discussed counting by 10 when not starting at zero as we did for this problem.

Thursday, students worked in their table groups to build the number 123 in as many ways as they could using base 10 blocks. They kept track of their work in their math journal on page 9.  They had 7 minutes to come up with as many ways as possible to build 123.  Most students only came up with a handful of ways by the time the timer went off.  I then told them, there were 16 ways (insert shock and awe!).  Their homework for the weekend was to find the rest of the 16 ways.

Here are all 16 ways to build 123.

This activity really focuses on place value as well as number patters using addition which are two of the standards we cover in this first unit.

Place Value Notes

Today we worked looking at a number in a place value chart to identify the name of each place and value of a digit within that place.

We have started taking notes in our math journals in the format we will use throughout the year. We do not use our math text books, so these math journals will contain all of the learning we do in class.  Students will use them to refer back to them and we will also have notebook quizzes. We completed these notes in our math journal today.

We have also been working to complete our math glossary in our math journals.  Students are organizing frayer cards with vocabulary words on the outside color coded by unit. We will fill these out as we get to the words in each unit.  

In social studies we are learning about the globe and its parts. We watched a short video on how globes are made.