Welcome back! Last week we had a great start to the year. The teachers worked hard at creating and implementing class building and teamwork activities to begin to build the a positive rapport within their classrooms. This foundation is always crucial at the start of the year in order for successful learning to occur throughout the year.
Today was the first official day of beginning curriculum. A new part of the day in all grade levels is Math Differentiated Engagement Block (DEB). During this time of day the students will practice math fluency and number sense, as well build upon their problem solving skills. The first two weeks we will be focusing on building a math community. In 5th grade we started today's activity by showing them a picture and making observations about the picture. We then presented a question to go along with the picture. The students brainstormed through the problem, and discussed their strategies and solutions. The purpose of the activity was to work through a challenging problem without giving up, realize there are multiple strategies to solve a problem, and the importance of understanding why we used the strategies we did to solve the problem. Tomorrow we will move into discussing how things we like are connected to mathematics, and how we are all mathematicians in our own way.
Below is the picture and question that was presented to the students.
Students realized that multiplication was an operation that would be needed to solve the problem. Many students noticed the number of cans in each box and multiplied it by the number of rows in the group. Some students decided to find the total number of diet Pepsi cans, and then the Pepsi cans and add them together.
I look forward to continuing to work with the classroom teachers and students to develop more confident mathematicians.
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