We will be pretesting this week after our Star test monitoring to see what students know about geometry. Once that is done, we'll be running 2-3 groups within the class so that we can meet everyone's needs. Stay tuned to find out more about what exactly students will be learning.
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The Archimedes House is finishing up a quick unit on using place value to multiply. This is a unit that we pre-tested and found 2 students who did not need it. As we got into the unit, we found that primarily, students didn't know the vocabulary used in the unit. We quickly addressed that and are post-testing next Tuesday. As the rest of the house has practiced multiplying by 10s and 100s, the two who already knew this information did work on planning on a trip from Chicago to Denver in a covered wagon! Our next unit will be "Architect Arithmetic" to solve problems used in building. Students will be building replicas (I use that term loosely) of famous building around the world.
Today, students will be experimenting with pulleys to determine the mechanical advantage of adding more pulleys. We will do 4 different stations with 1 to 4 pulleys at each. Students will estimate force and distance raised for each and then do actual measurements of height raised and force needed on each. They will also be doing experiment journals in the scientific method to help explain what happens. You'll see data sheets come home next week.
Also, our Minute to Win It On Stage begins this week, since all students have had time to practice. We heard a couple of students last week who wanted to try and boy were the others impressed. Hopefully this will spur all students to want to work on math facts. We had a lot of maturity type mistakes- forgetting to answer 1 part, forgetting to see if they were to estimate or give a precise answer, or forgetting to show work. For many of these students this is a new concept. We will go over the test tomorrow to make corrections after our Star math benchmark test.
This Friday is the Leadership Muffin Morning. If your child comes home with a ticket tomorrow, they are invited to our session at 7:30. A student will be at the back door- Kinder rooms, to let them in with their ticket. The house of Archimedes is currently finishing up a project where students were building a budget for a business that would be selling at an outdoor community market day. Each business was loaned $350 for start-up costs. They got to choose what they wanted to buy with that money. We worked with place value and rounding through out the project. They also saw the associative property for addition in action as we looked at the different ways 2 businesses used their money. Next, they will be asked what they will sell and how they will decide how much to charge.
Later this week, we will continue practice on place value and rounding where they will be writing word problems that are more appropriate for rounding and those more appropriate for precise computations. This is the best activity I've ever done at school- EVER!!! This was a comment by a student this week as we found out about the complexities of density in a sink or float activity. Student's predicted before testing items like cantaloupe, grapes, oranges, wood, plastic, glass, etc. Who knew that tiny rocks would sink, but the cantaloupe would float???? Students did a long list of items, before writing about their results the next day! All of this talk of differences in density came about when Archimedes had to solve the problem of the density of the king's crown. Get your student to tell you about it.
This next week students will be making a budget plan to review place value and rounding. Can they keep to the budget? We'll see! |
Blog Author, Mrs. Albrecht
Mrs. Albrecht is a 30+ year educator. Having taught in both Texas and here in Eagle County, Colorado, she brings years of teaching expertise and technology to her classrooms. Archives
December 2017
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House of Archimedes
Another math/science house, the Archimedes House has 7 current members. We will be doing critical thinking in math and lots of experiments based around the life of Archimedes.