Area Investigation

 Students have been exploring area and experimenting with fractional side lengths. 

Warm Up:

What dimensions could you have for the area of 24 units?

Students used sticky notes to represent possible dimensions. Here are some student examples that students shared:

Follow up questions:

Do you have all of the possible dimensions? 

How do you know?

Next: Students were provided with the following question from Illustrative Mathematics!

Using the hallway tiles, which are 1 square foot each, students worked to mark out the dimensions for Chavone's bathroom floor. This helped students make sense of the fractional sides. This problem proved challenging as the fractional parts had different denominators. Students worked together and were able to solve the problem! Can our class fit in Chavone's bathroom? Yes!

Students finished the session by playing Name that Number! 

Name That Number!

 Our class has started our first unit in Everyday Math which is focused on volume and order of operations. Students are introduced to the game Name That Number where they are provided a series of numbers that can be used only once to arrive at the "Target" number. Students have choice over which operations they use and are encouraged to use parentheses in the expression. While students can play this game on their iPad, I prefer for us to share our expressions so students can see and hear how others approach the target number. It is FUN. Students love it! 

My screen was full of awesome student thinking! I rewrote some of our favorites on chart paper (so it is actually readable!). Pretty awesome huh?? When students use negative numbers or fractions in their expressions, this is quite instructive during the first week of school! Great fun and a super way to practice and play with order of operations!

Making Pizza!

 What a great first week! Students made pizza and shared smiles and tips for a great pizza pie! Thank you to our amazing families for sending in the toppings for a great cooking experience!

What Do You Meme?

Students spent the first few days of the school year building community and laughing! One of the fifth graders' favorite Back to School activities is to write memes. Here are some of our favorites!

2022-2023 School Year Starts Now!

 

Plotting... on a Cartesian coordinate plane

Students have taken a slight break from exploring fractions to lessons with the coordinate grid. Reading, writing, and plotting points on the first quadrant requires practice and purpose. Students were asked to represent the axes for the first quadrant and plot four destinations using cardinal directions.  

My example is here:

Directions for students:

Student examples: 

This assignment was not only informative (I used this as one of our bodies of evidence to support a Critical Concept) but students really enjoyed it! I had many students want to make additional maps "just for fun". Assuredly, that enthusiasm does not happen often during a math assignment! I appreciated the creativity that some displayed when plotting their locations. Whether students chose "rappers" or "athletes" as the stops and final destination, the assignment provided practice and a piece of evidence demonstrating how well students are able to produce and plot ordered pairs on a coordinate grid.

 Missouri Learning Standards addressed:

Define a first quadrant Cartesian coordinate system. a.    Represent the axes as scaled perpendicular number lines that both intersect at 0, the origin. b.    Identify any point on the Cartesian coordinate plane by its ordered pair coordinates. c.     Define the first number in an ordered pair as the horizontal distance from the origin. d.    Define the second number in an ordered pair as the vertical distance from the origin.

Plot and interpret points in the first quadrant of the Cartesian coordinate plane.

Fraction Action!

 Students are knee-deep with fractions. When you say Fractions, even many adults admit that they "hate" fractions. Yet, teaching fractions has provided some of my most joyful teaching days in math!

A wonderful Colleague introduced me to this post by Graham Fletcher:

Below, you can see how students talked through the points on the number line.

I was pretty impressed. You can see that my first "B" was not really centered at the 1/2 mark (really the second one is not great either!) and students originally noted 3/8. When the student explained why it was 3/8 vs. 4/8, I knew that I needed to redraw my 1/2 mark for the rest of the conversation to move forward.

The number line was presented in purple. The annotation in pink marker shows the kids' thinking.

This string was fun! Students recognized the pattern of the half from the previous string becoming the endpoint for the next string. In other words, we kept narrowing in on the values between the half and the whole.

We have also started many lessons by thinking about how we can label fractional parts and how they are equivalent to other parts.

I highly encourage you to try these with your students as they were informative and built conceptual knowledge along the way!

Students shared their ideas:

Here is another example where students 

shared their thinking:

Original:

I loved the green outline of the quadrilateral that was 3/8. I did not see that one!