Last week was a little crazy, so we only had three warm-ups that stretched all throughout the week.

Monday

We came back to division (again) this week, as it’s a skill that many kiddos still have trouble with, even at this point in the year.  We have another unit of it in a couple more weeks, but we need the practice nonetheless.  The difference, too, this time is that we’re working on using a different strategy.  In the past–like when we were first learning how to divide–we thought about the number as a whole, and worked to find groups inside of it, rather than using the traditional algorithm.  Our focus was on understanding what division means, and we incorporated what we knew about multiplication as much as we could, as well.  This time, we’re trying to use the traditional method–still connecting to multiplication–but just organizing our thinking and our numbers in a different way.  We have been talking about reasonableness of answers, too, and use estimation to help us determine if our answers make sense.

The Rest of the Week

The rest of the mornings during the week were busy, we we actually took a couple of days to work through these problems.  You’ll notice a second division problem and then a good ‘ole adding fractions problem because we’re still fuzzy on this concept.  But truly, this is what is perfect about Math Warm-Ups–being able to easily revisit concepts that we need more time with.