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| Math whiteboard magic with fractions, decimals, and percents! |
Another brilliant week with strange weather. Make up your mind, mother nature! Rain, or shine:) We have transitioned from our focus on
How We Express Ourselves to
How We Organize Ourselves. Students are still completing their final touches on their Publisher page for our community TISWitness book - our final project. They have added sketches, photographs, and supporting images from the Internet to help illustrate the five ways of looking at an object. To aid our readers, each student has included an introduction and a variety of non-fiction conventions such as cut-aways, labels, captions, diagrams, bold text, and more. The pages really look fantastic!
Prompted with the question, "What do we want to know about...
How We Organize Ourselves?" students asked many different wonders about why the world is structured in certain ways. We discussed human and animal modes of transportation to why planes should have pillows, instead of seats. In the end, students wanted to approach a system - a money system - as a way to dig deeply into how humans organize themselves. Thus, our central focus, or idea, was born!
To tackle this we went back in time, before our current paper money and electronic money system was used. Given four key ingredients, students had to barter, or trade, with each other to obtain the correct ingredients to make what we called "Hobnail" cookies. Please note: These cookies are imaginary. In a discussion, we realized bartering was very time consuming and the idea of
coincidence of wants was discovered. That is, bartering works when each person in the exchange is willing to give up what he/she has. Also, some people might have to make a trade they did not want to. One problem, thusly, was this might not always be the case.
We decided to change it up a bit for a second go and introduce two shillings per person to the situation. This time it was faster and people got what they needed. However, there were some problems again. Some people could be devious and collect more than what they needed on a particular ingredient, or they could use the shillings to offer more or less of something they did not need or want. Ah, tricksters! We did not like this at all! Robbery, jail, theft, cheating, and other ideas started to surface.
So where to next? Stay in the past! We read a script, or scene, written around this time. Through examining the script, practicing, and performing it we realized bartering was not that easy. Also, a second evolution of "currency" called
commodity money was discovered, including furs, tobacco, pearls, and even services like tutoring. So far money is more complicated than we thought. We found many issues like what if you wanted to trade for some flour and sugar and all you had was a goat? The goat is valuable, but too valuable when compared to the flour and sugar. You can not cut the goat in half, so what do we do? Tricky stuff. This week will attempt some alternative solutions, continue the history of money, and tie in our studies with the Silk Road. Let's see what happens!
We have extended our study into fractions, decimals, and percents. The abstract nature of these concepts requires a deep understanding and manipulation of our base ten system. As such, we are having a ball writing on writeboards, place value mats, worksheets, center fraction cards, fraction games, and more. We will transition into our next unit soon.
Students have chosen a group, or partner, to read with for Book Clubs. Remember the Pros and Cons list your child shared with you at Student Led Conferences? Well, we took the advice and created more choice and responsibility for Reading. Students have appropriately chosen a group, book, and set roles for each person. Without prompt and completely independent at this point, students are using multiple strategies to find meaning behind unknown words, encouraging and modeling for each other how to read with better expression and intonation, and asking questions to clarify and deepen each other's thinking. Outstanding work! Enjoy the weather and week!
Homework:
Read 20 minutes to continue to improve your fluency and vocabulary.
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Friday:
Pulling out all the stops for May
Book clubs: Owned and Operated by them!
Friday Fun!
The trickster of Hobnail!
