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!

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!