I hope you all had a relaxing winter break with your families. I was so excited to see the students yesterday and to hear about all of their adventures over the past two weeks!
I wanted to share a couple of pictures from the final day of school before the break. The students had the opportunity to explore structures and surface tension by building 3-D cubes and then dipping them into a special soap solution. They were amazed to see different kinds of bubbles and shapes that formed inside of their cubes throughout the experiment.
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As for math, we have already jumped into our new unit covering fractions. Yesterday we reviewed how to reduce fractions to lowest terms/simplest form. Today we started to explore improper fractions by using a common everyday example: eggs! Students used standard one-dozen egg cartons to determine the fractions for 3, 6, or 8 eggs, and then we tried something new. What if you had 14 eggs? 19 eggs? Or 30 eggs? Through hands-on exploration and by drawing sketches, students started to understand new ways to write fractions that have a value greater than one.
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As for math, we have already jumped into our new unit covering fractions. Yesterday we reviewed how to reduce fractions to lowest terms/simplest form. Today we started to explore improper fractions by using a common everyday example: eggs! Students used standard one-dozen egg cartons to determine the fractions for 3, 6, or 8 eggs, and then we tried something new. What if you had 14 eggs? 19 eggs? Or 30 eggs? Through hands-on exploration and by drawing sketches, students started to understand new ways to write fractions that have a value greater than one.
Over the next two weeks we will practice converting improper fractions to mixed numbers and vice-versa. We will also continue to practice reducing all of our answers to simplest form. Finally we will solve real life problems using fractions and play some games to reinforce these skills. This material is found in Chapter 7 of the math textbook. There will be a test about this topic sometime during the week of January 19th-23rd.
As always, please contact me with any questions or concerns. I look forward to a successful second term working with your children!
As always, please contact me with any questions or concerns. I look forward to a successful second term working with your children!