Happy New Year!

Reminders:

We have a field trip to the Oakland Museum of California on Thursday, January 19 from 8:45-3:00 p.m., as part of our study of the Gold Rush. Please let us know if you are interested in accompanying us as a chaperone that day--it should be fun and very educational!

Homework:

Fourth grade math homework, due tomorrow
4th Grade Purple group: Complete JUMP packet 1
Option 1 (plum); also practice multiplication facts using your multiplication cards
Option 2 (periwinkle)

4^th Grade Blue Group homework: Multiplication worksheet.

Fifth grade math homework:

Work on Tuesday HW in the packet, a simple gathering of everyday uses of fractions, decimals, and percents.

Science homework:

Ocean Zone vocabulary science homework is due on Friday. Use of a dictionary, ocean resource book, and/or the Internet will be necessary for this assignment. The following are sites with ocean zone diagrams that may be helpful. There are many more available online.

www.enchantedlearning.com/biomes/ocean/sunlit/

www.mos.org/oceans/life/index.html

www.seasky.org/deep-sea/ocean-layers.html

www.eoearth.org/article/Epipelagic_zone

www.euromarineconsortium.eu/wiki/Deep_Sea

We started the morning with a student search, where students looked for people who had done various things over the break, such as: read a book, traveled on a plane, stayed at home, visited with relatives. After snack, we also played the whole group game "When the Cold Wind Blows," finding things we shared in common. Re-establishing our community as we begin the New Year is important work that lays the groundwork for the exciting academic work students are embarking on this winter.

Fourth grade math

Today the blue group revisited our work in multiplication from before the break. We practiced partial products (multiplying by place value), and then learned the “traditional” multiplication method. The students practiced multiplying without carrying, and with carrying. Tonight’s homework is to continue practicing.

In the purple group, students started class solving as many multiplication problems from the times tables as they could in five minutes. Our goal is to build automaticity with these facts with repeated practice. Our question of the day was: How can we use sets (groups) to solve division problems? Using JUMP math, we practiced looking at situations to figure out what objects were being shared equally, what were the sets, or groups, and how many objects were in each group (set). Students in the periwinkle group had fewer division problems, and got some number sequence problems to work on instead.

Fifth grade math

We kicked the morning off with a little mental math, an important warm-up for the start of a new unit. Converting fractions to decimals and percents is what we will be working on in the next few weeks. I assured them that fractions are very useful in our everyday lives, and yes, not only for dividing pizza amongst a group.