Reminders:
- Your students will be performing at the Winter Holiday Concert this Wednesday December 14, 6:00-8:00 p.m. at Northbrae Community Church. We expect all children to attend, so please let us know ASAP if your child cannot attend. Parents are encouraged to bring cookies for the celebration if you can, and students are asked to dress in “festive holiday attire”--something colorful, slightly or fully formal, and fun.
- Please join us for our Holiday Family Potluck at lunch on Friday, Dec 16. Please bring a dish to share at 11:45 a.m. to the classroom; we will eat together from 12:15 to 1:00 p.m. in Strawberry Creek.
Strawberry Creek Homework:
Fifth Grade Math homework
This week's homework is in two parts:Part 1
Fourth grade math homework, due tomorrow
All students--Give your parents their letter (download here).
Blue Group Math homework
Purple group
Option 1 (plum): Multiplication cards, instructions & Unit 3, page 4
Option 2 (periwinkle): Estimating products
Hopes assignment: Due Wednesday, 12/14
At the beginning of the year, we wrote our hopes for the school year. Similarly, the holidays celebrated by many families during the winter, and the turning of the calendar to a new year, are often used as opportunities to think about what lay ahead. Take a moment this evening to contemplate (think about) your hopes. Write at least one sentence about each category below describing your hope. For example, write one sentence for your hope about Friendship, one sentence for Family etc.
Write at least one hope each for:1. Your Family
2. Your Friendships
3. Yourself in school
4. Yourself out of school
5. Other – (world, people, nature, animals . . .)
Take your time to write neatly and clearly.
Proof Read for Capitals, Punctuation and Spelling. Have someone help you check.
Math
Fifth grade math: 5th graders are finishing up their short unit on subtracting large numbers and place value this week. They played a much more difficult variation of the game Close to 100 called Close to 7500. I tell the students that it is mostly a matter of finding seven-thousand four hundred ninety ten. In other words, it requires that you use a more advanced understanding of place value to add large numbers instead of an algorithm.
Fourth grade math:
Some students switched groups again today based on their performance on the pre-assessment, to begin our new unit called Multiplication Towers and Division Stories.
The blue group (reconfigured slightly from last week based on the recent multiplication pre-assessment) revisited multiplication today. We practiced skip counting to find facts and breaking multiplication problems into chunks to solve mentally.
In the purple group, students answered as many multiplication problems as they could in 5 minutes as a warm up, since we will be working on mastering automaticity with multiplication facts through 12. Then the students in the periwinkle subgroup, who have already mastered double-digit multiplication, worked on the Paper Pool project, in which they looked for patterns in the bouncing of a pool ball on different dimension grids. Students in the plum subgroup highlighted multiplication facts they are still memorizing on their 5 minute warm up, which they will use for homework tonight. Then we looked at breaking apart numbers in double-digit multiplication problems to make arrays, and students worked on solving a 12 x 14 word problem using this approach.
At the end of the day today we read the mathematical picture book, "One Grain of Rice," by Demi. If your child asks you for an allowance of one penny, doubled the next, and doubled again the next week and so on for 30 weeks, then you may want to read this book before you agree.
