Monthly Archives: February 2014
Day 76: Snow Day
There is nothing like ending an already shortened week (New Year’s Day) with a Snow Day! (Yes, I know that I’m way behind on my blog. This post is from January 3!)
Day 75: The Candy Shoppe
During the summer I took Jo Boaler’s online course How to Learn Math. It was incredible. One of the assignments was to revise a problem or activity to make it more open. The result was The Candy Shoppe Problem. By … Continue reading
Day 74: Conspiracy Theory
“Why do we need to know the greatest common factor and least common mulitple? When are we going to use it?” asks one of my 5th grade advanced students. My response. “Don’t you know about the hot dog and hot … Continue reading
Day 73: Which Place?
Estimation is subjective. While certain estimates are more reasonable than others, estimation is about the mental math and/or logic behind them. Why is it that the moment I ask my students to estimate the solution to a problem, someone calls … Continue reading
Day 72: Counting by Decimals
Note to self. Students need exposure to counting decimal numbers by 0.1, 0.01 and 0.001. We teach students to count sequentially by 1 and skip count by 2, 5, 10, 100 and even 1000. Why isn’t more time devoted to … Continue reading
Day 71: Exploring LCM
Using their knowledge of the greatest common factor, Venn diagrams, and playing Hamburger and Fries my 5th grade advanced students discovered the relationship between the prime factors and the least common multiple. The exploration began with listing the multiples of … Continue reading
Day 70: Hamburger and Fries
Hamburger and Fries is a game I picked up at a conference about 7 years ago. Similar to Buzz, the game begins with counting consecutive whole numbers. Multiples of a particular number, such as 3, are replaced with the word … Continue reading
shlager
Window of Opportunity. A 180 blog. 