Mrs. Spence’s Class

Benchmark, what a funny word - but it’s really a great tool for all concerned. They are marks in learning, hopefully showing progress.

We’ve just finished our last (3rd) math benchmark and I’m very proud of my students. We’ve discussed and calculated raw scores (the number of items correct.) Some students are working for passing (30 out of 44), some for commended (40 out of 44), and some are working for a perfect score (44 out of 44). And boy are they all working - they look like little bees buzzing about…some working by themselves, some in groups of 2, some in larger groups - but all are working! Yea!…a teacher’s dream - involved students, excited about math!

A big THANK YOU to our wonderful PTO! Our homeroom class had the most children order Domino’s pizza so we were treated to our very own pizza party today for lunch! It was delicious. And since it was such a great day, we decided to have a picnic lunch.

So, if we have 22 students and each student got two pieces of pizza, how many pieces did we eat?

Want a challenge?

IF each pizza was cut into 8 pieces, how pizzas did we need for everyone to have their two slices?

Send me a reply with your answers…I have stickers!

The past few days we’ve been practicing our math skills on paper in testing format. Here are the main points:

* write out all information

* use your strategies (Giant G, 3 rule, multiplication helps, etc.)

* while reading the word problems…”get the movie going in your head”…

* put on your “blinders” to distractions

* use your Math Chart

* THINK

It sound simple, but just following these simple steps will help you when testing.

Tomorrow we’ll be in the computer lab learning something new. Wednesday we’ll review our benchmark 1 and 2. Then Thursday is our LAST MATH BENCHMARK. I’m excited to see what all you’ve learned from the last benchmark. The next step will be the official TAKS math test. We’re almost there!

Yes - we were able to make a connection to the word Valentine and use it in our probablity lesson today. How…?

Well, we took hearts with a letter on each and put them in a bag. We predicted how many draws from the bag it would take until we pulled all the letters in the word “VALENTINE”. Some guesses were a little low, some were a little high, and some were just right. And that’s OK! We had to justify why we made our prediction and some people just guessed. And that’s OK too! It’s a great strategy to use when you check to see if you were right or not. From our predictions, we found the range of our numbers. We wondered where our particular number would fall…

Many students were able to explain that since there were 9 letters, it might take 2 to 3 times for each letter drawn to actually be able to spell out our word. As it turned out, each class had an average of 23 draws to complete their word. Then we checked which letters were pulled most often. Hm…I wonder why most groups pulled “E’s” and “N’s”?

Send me a reply if you know!

Our day ended on a “sweet” note…ahhh…chocolate! Our party was really fun! Thanks to our Homeroom Mothers we had cookies and punch after a long day of learning!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

There are three different kinds of transformations:

translations, rotations, and reflections

Using a trapezoid, we drew out these transformations. Notice the arrows that show the direction that shape moved. Also notice the vertex in rotation and the mirror in a reflection. It helps to remember these simple moves.

We also did our transformation “dance”.

We SLID…for our translations and we TURNED…for our rotations.

How do you find the equivalent fraction? There are two strategies: cross multiply or divide.

 For example:

If you have the fraction 4/8, you can divide both the numerator and denominator by the same number to simplify it. Do you know what you would divide by? Do you know what the simplified fraction would be?

Send me your answer!

Here’s another example:

Is 4/8 equal to 2/3? Cross multiply them to find out What do you think?

Send me your answer!

What a great day! All the shirts, posters, Legos, bracelets, and necklaces were terrific! It was neat to celebrate all the learning that has taken place over the last 100 school days together.

In honor of today, we played a game to see which number would be rolled the most if we rolled a die 100 times. We had mixed results…do you know why? Post a comment on why you think we all had different answers.

We’ve been tracking the days of the school year and we’re REALLY close to 100! To celebrate all of our hard work, we’re going to have a special math day, Thursday, February 7. Wear a decorated shirt, necklace, bracelet, or bring in a collection showing 100 items to show the class. It will be a super fun day AND you’ll earn extra credit for your extra effort! What a deal!

Today we combined our knowledge of perimeter (all the way around the sides) with area (length x width). We used our graph paper to review perimeter and then used squares to demonstrate covering the shape to find the area. After we used these items, we moved to more difficult multiplication. Boy, it was tough. We had to remember our facts…(which are a bit rusty) and the steps needed for more complicated multiplication problems. Tonight we had homework, page 35 (only 4-5 problems). Remember, if you need help, ask for it!

I can hardly believe that this is the last day of January! Take a look at our January calendar and all that we’ve learned this month.

We learned the attributes of shapes like trapezoids, rhombuses, squares, and rectangles. We also categorized the shapes as quadrilaterals and/or parallelograms. Looking at the patterns, we discovered that that the blue rhombuses were even and composite; the orange squares were square numbers; the yellow rectangles were multiples of 3; the red trapezoids were prime and odd.

We measured our heights and used those measurements to find the median, mode, and range of a set of numbers.

Using post-it’s, we’re keeping track of the days in school. We’re going to celebrate on day 100 and we’re almost there!

Today was day 95; we’re using the day to write in decimal form (0.95), a percentage (95%), and as a fraction (95/100).

Finally, using play money, we’re continuing our subtraction of 1000 x the date.

I wonder what the February calendar will look like and what skills we’ll be learning? I can’t wait!