Division: Choose Your Own Numbers

 Students have been working on multidigit multiplication and are practicing division each day to build the relationship between the two operations. In addition to utilizing number strings, students are working together to use various strategies to solve equal share problems.

Students were presented with problems that they could solve "as is" or adjust the numbers by choosing from the other options. When students choose the numbers, this provides the teacher with information too! Are they choosing numbers that are a "good fit"? A challenge?

You can see how the student is creating a model to represent the problem. She did have three pandas and she is trying to distribute the "bamboo" equally to each bear by using tally marks. While she needed some support, the teacher can see her approach and that she is able to approach the problem independently.

This student is using a partial quotient strategy utilizing multiplication. Does his "answer" match his work? What questions could move him forward? What does his 1/3 represent? Where is that 1/3 coming from if you had a difference of zero?  

Here you can see some student strategy use:

Invasive Species!

 Students have completed our Life Science unit by investigating various invasive species. Using one of our Benchmarks reading series texts, students selected an invasive species and identified the problem and solution to reduce the spread of some challenges that are facing our environment.

Visualizing Length

 How much is 10 times more? A 1/10 of? The answer depends on what your whole is. In our opening lesson introducing powers of ten, we did an investigation using the book Actual Size  by Steve Jenkins as our anchor text.

Our first task was to determine the size of an average fifth grader in our class. Students lined up from shortest to tallest and we found the median height which was 60 inches (5 feet) and represented by the brown paper outline. 

The book's closest animal that was 1/10 of 5 feet was the Goliath Beetle. 

Measuring out the Giant Squid (59 feet in the book) we rounded to 50 feet and said that our squid was not yet full-grown to benchmark it to 10X more than 5 feet. We tried to measure the length in the classroom using meter sticks.

Using a long hallway and yarn to mark the length, 

we measured 50 feet!

Students were challenged to visualize what 10 Time MOre of the Squid would look like! We knew we would have to go outside as the commons area in our building would still be too short. 

We also discussed how if we would have started with the Goliath beetle as our whole, we could have easily determined 100 times more length but it would have been difficult to represent 1/100 the size of the Goliath Beetle.