Week of January 30, 2017

Our fifth graders are currently working on developing understanding of decimals and how they relate to fractions.  We are primarily working with numbers in the tenths and hundredths, but are also addressing understanding of thousandths and ten thousandths. It has become blatantly apparent that we really need to anchor our concept of combinations of ten so we can work efficiently with these numbers.  I stopped our lesson on Friday to teach our students a card game called "Once in a Blue Moon" which uses all the combinations of ten with the cards 1-9. So please encourage your child to play this solitaire game,  

We have also been playing a verbal game called; "I have, You need,,," which helps students think about adding up amounts that will equal 100.  So for instance, we started out with easy numbers that are combinations of tens, then moved to numbers ending in 5, and are now using numbers with single digits as the last number.  It looks like this:

I have:        You need:

20                80

40                60

35                65

15                85

27                73  etc.

I would encourage parents to play this with your fifth grader while in the car, at the table, or whenever you have a quiet idle moment together.

Our week ahead will be short as we will miss 1/2 a math class both on Wed and Friday due to a special outdoor animal tracking expert meeting with Mr. Lenihan's and Ms. Carroll's science classes. Also it is our last Winter Wellness Ski Day on Thursday morning so we miss math on that day as well.