Grade 4...bring it on!

Yes, your kids are almost in Grade 4.  Seems like the school year just began.

Assessments are over.  Doing a quick scan of students' work, I was glad to see lots of correct answers, but I know some questions caused problems.  Even some things that we reviewed, and practiced, and reviewed, and I thought students had them down, caused problems on the assessment. 

I am hopeful that your child's overall results will be good, but when you receive the results in the fall, please don't panic if there seem to be areas of concern.  The kids are still young.  Their brains are still developing.  Some concepts take time for some of us to fully understand. 

I'm not sure, but you may notice a difference between the mark I give your child on the report card and the results of the assessment.  Please keep in mind that I see your children every day and I see them showing and applying their math skills and knowledge in different ways in class, both on their own and when in groups.  That is what I base my marks and comments on and it is very different way of assessing that the Provincial Assessment approach.

We have about 2 and a half weeks left of classes with a field trip and other activities planned during that time period.  The time we spend in math class will be spent practicing multiplication facts, doing some estimating, and general review to keep skills sharp. 

I won't be sending home any more homework sheets.  Thank you for your support in helping your children with these over the last few months.  Please just keep practicing math facts:  addition and subtraction to 18 (or 20) and multiplication and division facts to at least 36.  They will need to be strong with all of these facts in Grade 4 and beyond.

Have a great week!

Assessment Week

Thankfully, we'll only be doing assessments on Wednesday and Thursday, not all week!

Still, our focus for Monday and Tuesday will be to continue with review and to look at bar graphs and counting money.  We'll also count the faces, edges, and vertices of some 3-D shapes the students made last week.

Counting money is a small part of the curriculum, but it is an addition and subtraction concept and a valuable life-skill.  As I've mentioned in earlier posts, coins can be used to practice skip counting.  If you have some change at home, please have your child count it for you.  Discuss how to recognize the various coins and their values.  I'll be using plastic money at school, but being able to handle and count the real thing will be beneficial for your child.  Last week I added two online Canadian money games to the Websites tab.  There were some access problems for most students when we tried them at school on Friday, so maybe they'll work better at home.  They are:

Peter Pig's Money Counter

Money Metropolis

The class average on the practice quizzes we completed over the last couple of months improved with each quiz.  We went from 58% to 81% during that time.  The format of the quizzes is very much like the actual assessments, so I am hopeful that having the opportunity to do those quizzes and discuss some of the answers afterwards has been helpful to students.

I will be sending home a sheet with more practice and review questions on it.  They will be due Friday. 

Hope many of you will make it to Family Fun Night this Friday, June 7th.

Review Week

Things will be a little disjointed with different activities going on at the school, but on Tuesday and Wednesday morning we're going to be able to sneak in some extra math time, which is good.  A substitute teacher and I will be pulling small groups and individuals to give some extra help in areas where the kids need it.

Next Wednesday and Thursday students will be writing the math assessment in the afternoon each day during our regular math time from 1:00 - 2:00.  If anyone needs more time beyond the hour, they will get it.

This week and next we will be reviewing concepts we've covered.  I know some areas that we need to focus on as a group and in small groups, but if there is anything in particular that you notice your child is not sure of or even struggling with a bit, please send me an email with your concerns.

With the extra math time during the school day this week, I will not be sending home a math sheet, but feel free to make up your own.  You can't go wrong with math facts, practicing addition and subtraction with regrouping, and reading and understanding word problems and writing word problems for any of the four operations.

Have a great week!

Fractions and 3-D shapes

Please look for homework in your child's homework bag or backpack.  It will be due Thursday, which will give two nights to get it done.


We will continue our fraction work this week.  We will review the parts of a fraction and what they mean:

The denominator (the number on the bottom) tells how many pieces a whole object or set is divided into.

The numerator (the number on the top) tells what fraction of a whole you are talking about.


Students will also compare fractions with the same denominator, which will mean that they will have to look at the numerator to decide which fraction is greater.

Students will also become aware that the larger the digit in the denominator is, the smaller the pieces of a whole actually are.

Here are some websites for review:

Cool Math 4 Kids: What are fractions?

Cool Math 4 Kids: Magic 1

3-D shapes are something else we will look at this week.  These will already be familiar to students as they have studied them in earlier grades.  The focus of our investigations will be to describe 3-D objects according to the shape of the faces, and the number of edges and vertices.  The shapes we will be considering are:

cubes
spheres
cones
cylinders
prisms
pyramids

The following is some of what students will need to know:

The first shape is a cylinder (like a can); the second shape is called a square prism; and the third shape is a triangular prism.  For prisms, the base (the shape of the end) is what determines the name.


If you have any question about anything, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Have a great week.

This week's goals...

Last week ended up being a short week for math classes.  In making my plans for the week, I had forgotten about the English classes attending a play on Thursday afternoon.  I ended up being out on Friday, so I left review work for my substitute.  As a result, we did not get to the calendar work that I was hoping to.

So, this week we will have a look at fractions and do a bit more with measurement, specifically having students decide when it would be best to measure in centimetres or metres or in grams or kilograms.  If we can fit some calendar work into the mix, we will.

The following week (May 20th - 24th) will be yet another short week and the week after that (May 27th -31st) I will need to be out on the 27th.  As we look at the last few concepts that we will need to prior to the assessments, we will continue to circle back and review past concepts. 

I plan to give the class the third sample quiz on Wednesday, May 15th in preparation for the upcoming math assessments.  I will send the first two completed quizzes home for you to see how your child did.  As a class, the marks improved from the first quiz to the second, so I am hopeful that the third quiz will be even better.

Remember that the Provincial Math Assessments will be given on Wednesday, June 5th and Thursday, June 6th.  As you make plans and book appointments, if you could please avoid these two dates, we would appreciate it.  I expect that we will be writing the assessments in the afternoon during our regular math time and, if needed, we will extend the writing time into the last half hour of the day.

Have a great week!

Still with measurement....

Weekends just aren't long enough to get everything done!  Sorry that I am once again late writing a new post.

This week we will wrap up our work on perimeter.  Today we talked about mass and two units of measure associated with it: grams (g) and kilograms (kg).  I showed the class some food packages and even a glue stick that all had a mass recorded in grams or kilograms.  Around the house, have your child look for things that are measured in grams or kilograms and have them compare those masses to everyday objects, such as a pencil, a cup, an apple.  With practice, students should be able to provide an estimate of the mass of an object.  An important first step is to at least be able to say whether an object has a greater or lesser mass than another object or package of food that has a known mass.

We will spend some time later this week looking at a calendar and using it to answer given questions.  Students need to be able to use the information on a calendar to solve various problems.  For example, your child should be able to look at a calendar page and determine what the date will be in five days' time.  Or, if soccer camp begins on May 18th, but registration happens three days before that, on what date will registration take place?

One of the questions on the homework page that was sent home yesterday involved a visual pattern.  I copied it from a practice test provided by the Province but I didn't notice that the instructions were incorrect.  Students could still give the next two terms in the pattern however and that would be fine. 

Next week we will review fractions which we spent some time on in the fall and then we will move on to looking at 2-D and 3-D shapes.

Please keep practicing addition and subtraction facts to 18 (or 20) and it would be great if you could practice multiplication and division facts to 36, just for fun.

Have a great week!

Measurement

We will continue with measurement this week and finally introduce the metre.  Students will relate centimetres to metres, measure using metres, and find referents for metres (everyday things that are about a metre in length) to help them with estimating lengths, widths, and heights of objects or places.

It will unfortunately be a short week, so we will make the most of our time together and explore and investigate as much as we can.

Last week I gave the students Quiz #2 of the practice quizzes for the Provincial Assessment.  One red flag from the quiz was the following multiplication question:

Yogurt is sold in packages of 6.  Abby's mom bought 3 packages.

How many yogurts did she buy in total?

A.  18 yogurts
B.  15 yogurts
C.  9 yogurts
D.  3 yogurts


A number of students chose C.) 9 yogurts for their answer.  They simply saw the numbers in the problem, added them together to get a total and they saw the answer as one of the options so they chose it rather than really reading and thinking about the problem.  When we went over the problem in class the next day and I read the problem aloud, most students called out "18 yogurts" for the answer.  They seemed to recognize that this was a multiplication problem.  It probably helped that I sketched out 3 packages of 6 yogurts.  I encouraged them to do the same for any problem like this.

At home, if you see any opportunity to have your child use multiplication or division to solve everyday problems like the one above, please do so.

Another skill the kids need to keep up with is subtraction with regrouping which has been a challenge for some.

I have decided that we better return to weekly homework practice, at least for the next month, to revisit some of the skills and concepts that we covered earlier in the year and to reinforce ones that we've worked on more recently.  We'll still try to do some work with centers at school, but some extra practice at home will be helpful too.

This time around, students will receive their homework assignment on Monday and it will be due in class on Wednesday.  That will give me time to correct it and to be prepared on Thursday to go over any problems that students have trouble with.

Have a great week!