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!

Perimeter....continued

We began looking at perimeter last week, adding up the lengths of sides of a sports card, then creating figures on 1cm grid paper and totalling the measures of all the sides.  I showed the class a couple of irregular figures and we reviewed how to count the sides of those.  This week we will just concentrate on regular figures (squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons, etc.) to make sure students understand the concept of perimeter with those.  Last week when a substitute was in for me one day I asked her to give students different perimeters and students had to create figures with those perimeters.  That was a challenge for some, so we will review this and do more for practice.

If there is time this week I will introduce the metre as a unit of measure and relate it to the centimetre rulers students are already familiar with.

I am planning to give the class a short quiz on Wednesday.  This quiz is one supplied by the Province in preparation for the Provincial Assessment in June.  The results will give me an indication about where to focus review before the assessment.

Questions to share with your child....which operation would you use to solve each problem? Addition?  Subtraction?  Multiplication?  Division?  Read them carefully.  Students should sketch out what's happening in the problem to help them.


The school purchased 5 pizzas that had been cut into 10 slices each.  Do they have enough to give one slice to each of 65 students who ordered pizza?


A stack of 50 hockey cards was divided among 5 friends.  How many cards did each friend receive?

Mrs. Delgado found 37 Easter eggs on the weekend.  Ms. Driscoll only found 2.  How many more did Mrs. Delgado find?

On Earth Day neighbours picked up garbage on their street.  One family collected enough garbage to fill 14 bags and two other families got together and filled 59 bags.  How many bags of garbage will need to be picked up by the garbage truck?


Have a great week everyone!

Extra Short Week

With the class attending a movie on Thursday afternoon and the Good Friday and Easter Monday holidays following that, we will only have 3 math classes this week and hopefully 4 next week.

We did some skip counting practice on Friday from 0 to 1000 by 25.  If you have some extra quarters around or play money get your kids counting by 25.  Once they recognize the pattern .... 0, 25, 50, 75 .... they should be able to get a nice rhythm going.  Once they get the pattern down the expectation is that they should be able to start skip counting by 25 forward or backward from any number in the sequence, ie.,  start at 325 and go forward or backward or start at 575 and go forward or backward.

Along with continued practice with division and multiplication, perimeter will be our focus this week.  Perimeter is the distance around the outside of an object.  The shape could be a regular shape such as a rectangle or triangle or it could be irregular such as the outline of a foot or shoe.

I have added to websites to the Websites tab for students to practice calculating perimeter.  You might need to explain that "ft" is short for "feet" a unit of measure in the Imperial system which we do not teach.  They should know that "cm" stands for centimeter.  We haven't talked about the meter yet, but the abbreviation for that is "m".

Find the Perimeter

Perimeter Climber


Here are some word problems to try this week.... Which one is multiplication and why? Which one is division and why?

There are 4 cards in each box. How many cards will you have if you buy 9 boxes?


You need 36 invitations for a family party.  The invitations come in boxes with 4 cards in each box.  How many boxes will you need to buy?


I hope everyone is enjoying this more spring-like weather we are having :-)

Have a great week!

This week...

Sorry, folks.  I forgot to post last night.

As I look at the calendar with a lot of short weeks this month and into May -- with holidays, PD days, and various scheduled events -- I expect that we will only have 34 math classes until the assessment days in June.  That has been a bit of a shock to me!  Eight weeks sounded better, but then I remembered the holidays, etc.

In the stations I set up last week, and that we are using again this week, students are reviewing and practicing place value concepts, division, multiplication, and skip counting by 5.  One station is actually a little project called "Run a Candy Store" that incorporates place value, including writing numbers in expanded form (176 = 100 + 70 + 6), comparing and ordering numbers, and subtraction.  These are all outcomes that we have worked on.  Another project focuses on multiplication and if we have time, we'll do that one as well.

As far as home support goes, please continue practicing multiplication facts and the concept of division.  How do you use division at your house?  Cutting a pizza?  Cutting a pie?  Dividing up a certain number of playing cards?  Dividing up chores (THINK: How many chores need to be done? How many people are going to help? How many chores will each person do?).  Look for real-life opportunities to involve your child in solving problems that involve multiplication and division.

Here's a division problem to discuss with your child.  See if s/he can model it (draw it out) to show what s/he needs to do to solve it:

Lexie spent 2 hours gathering all of her watercolor paintings. She thought of placing an equal number of paintings in four of the rooms in the house. If Lexie has 32 watercolor paintings, how many paintings will be placed in each of the four rooms? 

(BEWARE OF EXTRA INFORMATION THAT CAN THROW STUDENTS OFF, ie., 2 hours gathering her paintings.  It is not important to the problem and students need to recognize that)                                (from www.k5flearning.com)

Perimeter is another topic I introduced very briefly when we had a few moments at the end of class one day.  We will be spending more time on this in the coming days.

And don't forget about addition and subtraction with regrouping (carrying/borrowing, as we used to say)!!!!

So much to review.  So much to practice.  Thank you for any help you can give us.

Have a great week!

Parts of a Division Equation

Sorry, I forgot to email the link to last night's post.  Please see it below this one.

I just wanted to finally add the correct terms for the parts of a divisions equation.  The kids got me again today when I was tripped up trying to remember which is which, the dividend or the divisor.  I knew them, but was uncertain.  Not good, they told me!!  They are right!  But, we all confuse some things and even teachers get confused.

Here are the terms:

Dividend ÷ divisor = quotient

Example:

20 ÷ 5 = 4

20 is the dividend: the number being divided up

5 is the divisor: the number that tells us how many groups to make or how many to put in each group

4 is the quotient: the answer, which will either be how many are in each group, or how many groups, depending on the problem (if it's a word problem we're solving)


Okay, kids, now remember all of that :-)