We had such a wonderful feast for Thanksgiving on Tuesday, November 24th! Thank you to all of our parents for sending in such amazing food and goodies. Also, thank you to those of you who came in to join us in the celebration. Hope everyone had a very Happy Thanksgiving holiday!
We had so much fun in our Halloween Book Character Parade. Students in our class dressed as various flying food items from the book, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs." We also decorated our pumpkin to resemble a gigantic meatball over spaghetti noodles in the literary pumpkin contest!
We are beginning our new Math Investigations unit: Flips, Turns & Area this week! The first subject we learn about is tetrominos.
Students will find all possible arrangements of four squares, called tetrominoes by sliding, flipping and turning.
We will work with these ideas using paper cutouts and plastic math manipulatives on larger sized graph paper.
Being able to visualize how different shapes fit in space in an important geometric skill. It also has a lot of practical aspects. For example, think of how hard it is to get a couch up a stairway and into the living room- it's really a matter of slides, flips and turns!
Part of this unit is about discovering area as a measure of a flat surface. Look for opportunities at home to talk about area with your child. For example:
Do you have square tiles covering a floor or bathroom wall? How many squares are there? Suppose you make roll-out cookies with your child. This poses a problem of area: How can you place the cookie cutters so that you cover the most area, and have the least amount of dough leftover? Do you have to rotate the cookie cutter to get the best fit?
Have a good time exploring these ideas with your child!
We hope to keep you informed on any additional announcements!!
Dear Family,
During the next few weeks in math, our class will be working on an addition and subtraction unit called Combining and Comparing. We'll be focusing on interesting and real problems that involve combining and comparing two or more amounts.
Students will be learning about many different ways to solve addition and subtraction problems. Students will be encouraged to develop more than one way to solve a problem and to use methods that are based on understanding numbers and their relationships. Some of these methods may not be the ones you learned in school, but you may recognize some of them as methods you use in your daily life. We encourage students to develop strategies that make sense to them, that they can use easily and flexibly.
The point is for children to find useful and meaningful ways of putting together and taking apart numbers. While our class is working on this unit, you can help in several ways:
1. When your child has an assignment to do at home, offer your help and ask your child about what he or she is doing in class.
2. Ask your child to describe any of the homework problems and tell you about the strategy used to solve it. Communication is an important part of mathematics, and students need to describe their strategies through talking, writing, drawing, or using concrete objects. You can be an important audience.
3. You can also share your own ideas. At one point, we will work on the mathematics of "party planning." You might explain how you would figure out how to fit a number of different activities into a two-hour block of time.
An important emphasis in this unit is for students to recognize when and how to apply addition and subtraction and to develop procedures for adding and subtracting that they understand thoroughly and can use confidently. One of the most important things you can do is to show genuine interest in the ways your child solves problems, even if they are different from your own.
Thanks for your help and your interest in your child's mathematics!
