Christmas Shopping on a Budget

This morning we went Christmas shopping using our local sales papers! Students were given $100 each (imaginary money) to purchase gifts for all their family and friends. They could pruchase anything from the sales papers as gifts, but they had to stay within their $100 budget. Once they had figured out the total amount of money spent, they had to subtract to find how much change they would get back from a one hundred dollar bill. Some students were challenged to find the tax cost of their purchase. During our discussion of our task and looking at some receipts of recent real-life shopping trips, students said they did not realize so much math was used just to go shopping! One student stated after he finished shopping and figuring up his total money spent that he had a headache and that shopping was stressful- my husband thinks the same thing! We had so much fun with this task and I think they will look at their next trip to IGA, the Dollar Store, or Walmart a little differently!

Factor Christmas Trees

Today for our "Winter Wonderland Hands-On Wednesday", we completed some hands-on tasks, one of which was creating factor trees. We used Christmas trees to create our factor trees. Students were given a product, typed on a star, and they had to find all of the prime factors of that number by creating the factor tree. We are going to use the trees for another task later to find the greatest common factors of two given products.

Book Talk- Cameron

Cameron just finished the newly released book "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever" by Jeff Kinney. This book is part of a series and the main character is Greg. The book begins at Greg's house and Greg talks about how it's not fair when other people get hundreds of gifts and he only gets one! Greg gets into some huge trouble at school! Read on to see what happens!

Layers of the Earth

With our Earth Materials unit, we have just wrapped up our discussion on the layers of the earth and fossils. Listen as Isaac explains the layers from the model we created using play-dough.

Give One, Get One Thoughtful Ed. Strategy

This morning after watching a Bill Nye video on Fossils, students made notes throughout and then we completed a "Give One, Get One" task, where students share the notes they made from the video with partners. We used clock partners to share our ideas so students had a chance to work with peers other than the ones they usually sit with throughout each day. The goal of the task is to gather as many ideas as possible and it reinforces what they learned because they are explaining it and writing it more than once. They created a t-chart in their science journals with the headings of "Give One, Get One" to record their information.

More Multiplication Properties

Here are a couple more properties...

Properties of Multiplication

In math, we have been studying the properties of multiplication. When we talked about what each property meant, the students created hand motions to put with each vocabulary word. This helps us remember the meaning and makes it easier to apply. The properties we have been studying are the zero property, communative property, associative property, identity property, and the distributive property. Check it out!