Category Archives: Math

Math Warm-Ups January 28-February 1, 2013

Another busy week in Rm. 202!  This week we only had three warm-ups because of our schedule.  Enjoy solving them!

Monday

IMG127This warm-up was a nod to the next part of our geometry unit–coordinate grids.  We’re also going to continue to practice “old” skills like adding fractions to keep them fresh–and because many kiddos still didn’t quite get it during our fraction unit.

 

Tuesday

IMG128One thing that I want to make sure I always highlight for my kiddos is the fact that they know many things that help make math easier in their heads than on paper.  I want them to be flexible thinkers, and know how to do things in more than one way.  This one was a way to get them thinking about using  known (in this case a multiple of 10) to help them figure out a problem.  Below it is the number string that we worked through after the initial conversation.

 

Wednesday

IMG129Can you tell we ran out of chart paper this day?  Nothing like using every last bit of it!  While this question could have been seen as “easy” to some, I was hoping that since we’d done these before, kiddos could dig deeper and share a problem that was harder than just this plus this equals 125.  I LOVED it when Luke through out a problem with exponents!  We had a great conversation about how they work, and the best part is that we’re going to do more with them during our upcoming decimal unit–as we discuss expanded form.  It’s so great when kid provides a natural connection without even knowing it!  You can’t plan that kind of stuff.  Beautiful. 🙂

 

Math Warm-Ups January 22-25, 2013

This was a short week because of the MLK holiday on Monday, so we only had four warm-ups this time around.  Most were related to our current geometry unit, except for the last one from yesterday.  I’ll explain that one at the end.

Tuesday

IMG122Besides just knowing polygons and their names, a major focus of this unit is being able to figure out unknown angles using information that is already known.  That septagon that I made is actually created from 3 separate triangle pieces (that we know and have figured out the angles of), so then here I was asking them to use that known information to determine the measure of this new angle.  Many of them also used the idea of a “right angle + some more”, and the fact that it was an obtuse angle in their calculations.  We also focused on the way this question was worded: many went right to telling me WHAT the angle was rather than HOW they figured it out, which is what I was actually asking.  This is an important test-taking strategy that we were able to highlight, as well.

Wednesday

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This question was an extension of what we had just been talking about the day before.  Our focus was on all the different names that one polygon could have, as well as the continued use of known angles to determine unknown ones.  The “G” refers to the way that rhombus is labeled in the set of Power Polygons we use as manipulatives.

Thursday

IMG125This warm-up was a review of old knowledge, but then we used it to connect to our new concepts from this unit.  I reminded them (since of course this seemed like something they did AGES ago!) that area is just like all the work they did with arrays during our study of multiplication.  We also were reminded of how we could use our knowledge of order of operations to correctly write the equation of how we figured out the perimeter.  The lesson following this asked them to be able to create new rectangles based on this one, but with different area/same perimeter  or different perimeter/same area.

Friday

IMG126Hopefully you’ll notice the difference in this one.  This week we were looking at winter benchmarking data noticing that our 5th graders seemed to have a hard time showing that they are solid in computation skills.  It’s clear that we need to do more practice with computation even when it’s not the unit we’re in, as well as more practice with timed situations (the benchmark we use asks them to complete a certain number of problems in 8 minutes).  Other than the benchmark and standardized testing, they aren’t asked to do this.  Simply having more opportunities like that could be helpful.

Feast Week Part 6: Now We Cook!

So before we could FEAST in Feast Week, we had to have a feast, and that meant we had to make it!  So Friday afternoon, before our big party, we got busy making things.  Remember, our appetizers were party pickles, sausage snack wraps, fruit, and guacamole.  We got into our tribes to work.

Check out our culinary creations:

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If you missed any of the previous parts of this tale, check out the Feast Week tag for parts 1-5.  Next up: THE FEAST!!

Math Warm-Ups January 14-18, 2013

This week’s warm-ups are geometry related, as we are at the beginning of a 2D geometry unit now.  My hope was that they were review, since they’ve had similar units for many years.  And for the most part, they were.  Oh, and you’ll notice there are only 3 this week; the morning schedules were a little rushed on Tuesday and Friday, so we skipped them those days.

Monday

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And speaking of having done it before, my kindergartener is actually talking about these very things right now, too!  When I shared this question with him, he was able to tell me which were polygons and which were not!  The definition was simpler in kindergarten, but the idea was the same.  Cool!

Wednesday

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This one was pretty easy, but was a conversation starter for that day.  It helped us take the next step to putting quadrilaterals into categories.

Thursday

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When we first talked about this one, we were unclear about the definition for a parallelogram.  We spent our group time on Thursday clarifying this.

What do you know about geometry?  What questions would you ask for a geometry math warm-up?  Share some with us in the comments!

 

ActivActivity–January 16-17, 2013

Remember when we were in the middle of our fraction unit and we were dividing?  Think about the problem about bows: Avery had 6 yards of ribbon.  He’s making bows for packages, and each bow uses 1/3 of a yard of ribbon.  How many bows can he make?  Then think about how we all said 1/18 for the answer?  I’ll remind you of how we solved it:

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Today your job is to create a fraction problem with division.  I’m not going to tell you what the answer has to be–I want you to figure out that part, too!  You can divide a whole number by a fraction (like this one), or you can divide a fraction by a whole number if you remember how to do that.  Remember to make sure your story makes sense, that you have an answer that is LOGICAL, and that you sign your names so we know who’s amazing thinking it is! Good luck, friends!

ActivActivity–January 14-15, 2013

Today’s ActivActivity is related to the Math Warm-up we had the other day:

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Your job today is to come up with a story that uses FRACTIONS and has an answer of 3/4.  Work together with  your group to write one, and if you have time after that one, write another!  Leave your story in the comments for this post, and be sure to leave your names!

Feast Week Part 5: Let’s Go Shopping!

Hopefully if you’re here, then you’ve been along for the first parts of the journey, but if not, you can catch up on the beginning of Feast Week, the fractions involved, the meal planning, and the way our plan was derailed before I go on.  It’s been quite a journey already, that’s for sure!

After we had figured out exactly what we would finally buy, we had to decide where to shop and then head there to get what we needed.  Part of the job after they totaled up their appetizer cost was to determine whether it was a better idea to shop at Schnucks or Dierbergs for our ingredients.  Overwhelmingly, they decided that Schnucks was a better option for us.  And so to Schunucks we went!  Yes, you heard me right: I put 20 5th graders on a bus and took them to the grocery store.  And I did it by myself (along with Mrs. Hong and her class).  And they were great. 🙂

IMG655I wonder how many people were confused by the sight of a school bus at the grocery store!

We started by having a quick grocery store overview lesson–we talked about the general area where everything was, talked about the expectations (which were the same as at school!) and made a place to meet when we were finished.  And then they set off with their shopping lists to get what they needed.

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While they shopped I ran around wandered around the store to make sure everyone was doing ok (remember, this was the week before Christmas–the place was a madhouse!) and finding what they needed.  I cannot even tell you how proud I am of these kids.  Completely on their own, they maneuvered a really large store, politely made their way through crowds and even made smart shopping decisions–everything we bought was on sale!  We were all finished and back to our meeting spot in just about half an hour, which was record time, I think!

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Our original budget was around $97, and we made it out of there even under by a few dollars!  We spent right around $94, and like I mentioned before, EVERYTHING they chose was on sale.  The best part to me was when a group figured out that it was more cost effective to buy bags of 4 avocados that were 2/$5 than individually at 10/$10.  That’s some savvy shopping!

IMG658Check out that receipt!  My favorite part is at the bottom: “YOU SAVED $35.97.” Nice!

IMG656Congrats on a job well done, 5th graders!  You are grocery store superstars!

Next step–Part 6: Now We Cook!

Feast Week Part 4: A Change in Plans

The first parts of our Feast Week journey can be found here, here, and here. 🙂

Do you know Murphy?  Isn’t it his law that says that anything that can go wrong will?  Well he was present on the third day of Feast Week….

By Wednesday we were supposed to be ready to get our budget proposal to Mrs. Sisul so that we could be ready to shop on Thursday.  That was the plan, but then the plans had to change.

Like I mentioned before, we had decided to make 5 yummy appetizers.  We had figured out our shopping lists and figured out how much one batch of our goodies would cost.  And then we started multiplying.   And realized we were in trouble…

We first figured out how to change our  recipes to feed 20 (before we figured it out for 85) and we noticed something:

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We were using a favorite recipe of mine (from Catherine at weelicious.com) as an example and were figuring out how much of everything we’d need to feed 20, which meant we had to multiply our numbers by 5.  It was pretty easy work since most of the ingredients were cans or whole numbers.  When we got to the olive oil we got to display our fabulous fraction knowledge to create 5/3 which we simplified to 1 2/3 cups.

Ok, so all was well until we talked about how much it would cost us.  We started sharing our numbers from the day before for single batches of each recipe.  Some were around $5, but one was close to $15 for just one small amount.  We quickly figured out that if we were going to create the amount we needed for 85 people, we’d be multiplying the original numbers by 40! That suddenly sounded really expensive…

We went back to our tribes and revisited our numbers.  After adding together the total amounts for all five appetizers, to feed all of us we were going to be spending over $500! Obviously that was not going to work.  Mrs. Sisul loves us and thinks 5th grade is pretty great, but we were sure she wasn’t going to help us create a meal that cost that much–with all of the other things we figured it’d be almost $2000!

Then we had to make some decisions:

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Ultimately (while it was a hard decision to make and some actually had their feelings hurt a little), we decided to go with the things that were the most cost-effective: least amount of money for the biggest amount of food.  We decided to do sausage snack wraps, which are just little pigs-in-a-blanket, because they made 48 in one batch; party pickles (pickles wrapped in ham with cream cheese inside) also made many servings for not much money; guacamole, although we decided to ditch our original recipe and just use salsa and avocados instead of making it all “from scratch”; and fruit–but we abandoned the dip that was going to go with it and picked things we found in the add that was cheap for a lot (oranges, kiwi and apples).

After we reworked our numbers with our new plan, we were PLEASED to find out that we no longer had a budget proposal of $500, but of only $97.84!  And even after whittling it down by 4/5 (fractions, nice right?), we knew we could still get our goodies for less at the store by buying store brands instead of only choosing the major brands that were in the ads.

I can’t wait to tell you about our shopping trip!  Yep, you heard me right–we went on a field trip to the grocery store.  And we lived to tell about it. 🙂

Ready for Part 5?  Check it out here.

Math Warm-Ups January 7-11, 2013

Happy New Year!  I don’t know about you, but I was able to enjoy 16 days off between 2nd quarter and now and it was FABULOUS!  What a great gift to be able to spend two whole weeks with my family!  And now I am reenergized and ready to get back into a school groove. 🙂

So you know, if you’ve been here before, that math warm-ups are part of that groove.  This week I decided to revisit some older concepts (and by old I just mean beginning of the year–to a 5th grader that’s like an eternity ago!) just to remind them that they still need to know how to do this stuff!  Thankfully, most had not forgotten.

Monday

IMG103Ok, so I guess I lied about them all being oldies-but-goodies.  This one was actually based on a problem from an end-of-unit assessment that pretty much everyone got wrong!  I really needed to reiterate the fact that it’s really important to think LOGICALLY when you’re doing math.  The answer to that problem that most people said–1/18–doesn’t make ANY sense!  How the heck do I make 1/18 of a bow?!

Tuesday

IMG104Again, I wanted to make sure they had a solid understanding of the difference and the connection between multiplying and dividing fractions.

Wednesday

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Thursday

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Friday

IMG110This one ended up being a lot easier than I first anticipated.  I was really close to making it have the “rules” of being a fraction problem, but decided to give them a try with a less complicated one until they tackled a more difficult one.  There were promises for more of these next week where they can stretch their creative math muscles!  Can’t wait to see what they do. 🙂