Math: There is no additional homework in math today due to a Cerrito field trip tomorrow and Strawberry trip on Thursday.
4th Grade math handed out Monday will be checked on Friday.
Other Homework:
Work on Wordly Wise for 15-20 minutes.
Finish any book club jobs for the week.
Reminder: Our field trip to the Exploratorium is on Thursday. Please provide a packed lunch for your child, as hot lunch will not be available.
We began math class today with a missing factor game outside. We continued working on division, this time with a focus on Factor Families and ways to use multiplication and skip counting to solve division problems.
Lively discussion and perseverance in problem solving were the order of the day in Math Club! One of the most engaging problems, Petals Around the Rose, perplexed many students, emphasizing pattern-finding skills and patient persistence. A few were excited to finally figure it out, after much conjecture and testing, and have been sworn to secrecy. Try the game yourself here. Algebra was another theme today--students solved multi-step problems with unknowns, or built successive wall patterns, extending this to rules to make predictions, with our Growing Patterns problems. One of our third-graders generalized the wall problem to an algebraic rule, 2n + 2, and relished explaining why the number of blocks were always even. Finally, students explored an online pan balance activity, discovering relationships between symbols that would allow them to deduce values for each--great preparation for solving simultaneous equations in middle school and beyond.
Word study time focused on completing Wordly Wise review of lessons 1-4 and moving forward in Wordly Wise lessons. For the other half of our later morning, we brainstormed different writing topics that we can pull from for future writing.
We met in our book clubs today-- some groups discussed their books while others finished their reading and their jobs in preparation to meet tomorrow.
In science, we explored magnetism with magnets and other objects such as straws, foil, nails, and metal washers. After the introduction to magnets, students then constructed and electromagnet with a metal core and coil, a battery, and two different wires. They used their electromagnet to pick up multiple washers at a time!
