We're off to a great start this year! I left the first week of school feeling inspired and with a strange sense of calm. I really missed the kiddos and am so thankful for a second year with them! We also welcome our newest addition to the course - welcome Audrey! This week, we discussed two major habits that certainly apply in the math classroom: persistence and managing impulsivity. We used real-world examples and a video of impulsivity to discuss what strategies we will use when we feel stuck. How we will persist and avoid the tendency to impulsively conclude that we don't know during our mathematical exploration?
Diving into our first unit, Let's Be Rational, we started with the importance of estimating in the real-world. We discussed what situations in life called for overestimating and underestimating. The students came up with some deeply thoughtful ideas. I was very impressed with how seriously they took this discussion. They determined that while overestimating was better when having too little would not suffice (example: going to the store to buy a certain amount of items), overestimating by too much was also wasteful, as in the case of buying wood to design a balcony for a house. I supplemented our first investigation with a Calculation Nation game called Drop Zone which the students loved. It encourages flexible thinking and certainly provides ample opportunities for students to put their estimation skills to good use. I encourage you to play this game with your child at home to provide additional practice. We also applied estimation to figure out how much each teacher had in terms of space in the community garden (see slideshow above). As I walked around and tuned into group conversations, I heard "What if we use unit rates to scale up?" Students discovered that they could use "Mrs. Reece's 1/4 of a section to figure out more complicated sections" and that "There's another Barron part in there. How many "Barrons" can fit in this section?" These deep conversations about relationships between different sections and the most efficient strategies were certainly music to my ears! Here are some thought-provoking questions you might ask your child at home:
I'm so proud of our scholars - cheers to the first week! Truly, Mrs. Tamargo
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