Sunday, November 27, 2016

Week of November 28

Hello All,

Last week I spent an hour writing this blog, went to add pictures, and lost the entire blog.  I was so discouraged and didn't have it in me to sit and recreate it, hence no blog for last week.  It 's a new week and hopefully I will have better success.

The fifth graders are becoming quite efficient in their abilities to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators by using money and clock models to think about halves, quarters, fifths, tenths & twentieths (money) and halves, quarters, thirds, sixths, & twelfths (clocks). Some have discovered they can find tenths and fifths on clocks as well, but the numbers are more user friendly using the money model than the clock model.

This next week we will be looking at ratio tables and discovering how ratios ARE fractions.  They will be solving problems finding the best buy options through the use of ratio tables.

Students also have been working on finding fractional parts of whole numbers.  They worked on River Trail Maps that had various stopping sites along the trail so they had to find 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, etc. along this 30 km. trail.

This coming week students will have homework on Tuesday and Thursday.  Ask your child to show you how they think about fractions.  I know this is not the way we learned to find like denominators and follow a procedure, but please know that your children are learning about how to "think" about fractions and ways certain fractions relate to one another.  They will also learn how to find common denominators the way we did, it's just not the first approach as meaningful understanding has to come first.



No comments:

Post a Comment