I am so impressed with the work the kids in A008 have been doing this week. Last week we used charades to teach us about inferring, but realized that it can teach us so much more! When we were playing charades we stopped to revise and think of ways we could improve our acts to make the audience more likely to guess; and also to think about what strategies we could use as an audience member in order to guess what the acts were. We listed our thoughts on chart paper to help us be better actors and guessers. Our strategies worked! Although we used charades to help us with inferring, we actually found that charades is very similar to reading and writing. Being an actor, trying to get an audience to guess, is strangely similar to writing and being in the audience trying to guess is very similar to reading. The comparison is uncanny! Take a look at the pictures to the left to see the strategies we used to help us in charades and how they are similar to the strategies we use in reading and writing. If you are unable to see the writing in the pictures, there are two Word Documents below you can open to see. The students did a wonderful job making the comparisons themselves!
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- counting the number of books in a bin and multiplying that number by the number of bins,
- estimating the number of books in a bin and the number of bins, then finding the product,
- counting the number of books in a bin, then rounding up or down depending on how the amount compared with other bins, and then multiplying by the number of bins
- taking a wild guess
- thinking about the size of the books in a bin (more books in a bin with thinner books and fewer books in bin with thicker books)
- thinking that approximately 20 students have books out of the bin, so we need to add 20 to our total estimate
We concluded that since the majority of guesses were between 300-400, that this is the most likely range. The classroom library is always changing, so there is no way of knowing!
Friday's activity period was filled with a lot of singing! We listened to Frozen's "Let it Go" as a way to get into our extra credit math activity. Students have the opportunity to earn extra credit by writing a song about rounding to the tune of "Let it Go." When rounding, we remember "5 or above, give it shove. 4 or below, let it go." I was super impressed with the creative rhymes everyone was developing. I can't wait to see/her the final products!
We also started rounding decimals with the standard algorithm and with decimal models. Check out the videos below! The first is a clip of the students using their estimating strategies trying to estimate the number of chapter books in our library. The second video is of Michael giving a wonderful demonstration of how to add 3.26 + 1.29 using decimal models.
Kudos
Kudos to Michael who continued to provide us with a great demonstration of adding decimals after noticing he was being filmed.
Kudos to Jane for the fantastic example of adding decimals using decimal models, that reminded to record such great demonstrations. Also, Jane showed us a perfect example of how to infer by using the information from the text and your background knowledge.
Kudos to Charlie J. who showed us a wonderful example of descriptive language from I Survived the Destruction of Pompeii, 79 A.D. that was perfect for visualizing (Charlie, if you could leave that sentence in the comment section that would be greatly appreciated!).
Kudos to everyone for completing your first social studies test!
I wish you all a wonderful long weekend! Please leave a comment letting everyone know what your favorite activity was this week.
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