Fractions!

This past week we have been delving deep in to fractions during math.

As a class we are pretty confident in writing fractions, adding and subtracting them and using them in story problems. An area that we're just beginning to discover is converting fractions to decimals. Oh, and is it ever proving tricky! But, we're working hard and hope to master this skill soon.

At home, anything that you can do with your student and fractions will help to reinforce the skills they have already developed and will enforce the relevance of understanding fractions and their place in the real world. Cooking is a fantastic place to include your student and have them show off their fraction skills. If you double or halve a recipe, have your student make the conversions for you! Are you doing a building or construction project? Have your student help measure and work on adding and subtracting the fractions with you. Have your student figure out how old they are fractionally (eg. 9 2/3 years old). 

Here's a link to some fun math games that can help enforce fraction skills:

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/math.htm#fractions

http://www.gamequarium.org/dir/Gamequarium/Math/Fractions/

Museum Field Trip - by Steven, Emily, Grace & Devon

We took the bus downtown to the museum. After we went inside, we split up in to four groups and went to different areas with our museum guides. Here are some of the things that we saw:

After we had our tours and the outside lunch picnic, we got to go see an IMAX show about the Hubble Telescope.

After that it was time to go back on the bus and drive back to school. We had lots of fun at the museum and the people that worked there were nice. Most of us agreed that the dinosaur bones were our favorite exhibit and that the IMAX movie was awesome!

2011 School Year - Introduction

Welcome to my twenty-four new students and their families! This is our classroom blog where you can check in to see what we're up to in class. We do our best to update twice per week. The different things you will find in the blog are updates on our classroom activities, ideas for things that you can do at home with the students to supplement our in-class lessons, videos of different classroom experiences and relevant links that I think will be informative, fun or helpful to the students and their families. Please feel free to comment on the blog. I moderate all comments to filter spam, so there may be a delay before the comment shows up, but the students will all be able to read the notes left on the blog. Students will also be developing their own blog posts as part of our technology curriculum, so look to see who is authoring the posts in a couple of weeks. Welcome, again, and I hope this virtual portal in to our classroom helps you to keep informed of all we are discovering!

Waiting for the kids...