It has been a great first week back from our holiday break. The kids did a wonderful job getting back to work. We were able to cover a lot of ground. Here are some of the highlights of the week:
MATH
We spent the week reviewing how to do lattice multiplication. This method is just another tool that the students may use to solve more difficult multiplication problems. I created a video tutorial to explain the process and how it connects to partial products. This week also brought the start of our basketball math season. Building on the skills learned during football math, the students will again use real life statistics to simulate basketball games. Each student will play one game against each of the other students in the class. We will then have our own version of March Madness. It should be a lot of fun. All the students should continue to work on their basic facts. I have seen excellent progress, but there is still some room for improvement.
SCIENCE
This week we had some interesting discussions about the causes and effects of acid rain. We will continue our discussion of pollution next week when we talk about farm and salt run-off. I think the favorite part of the week for most of the kids was the pH activity we did today. The students brought in a variety of household substances so that we could test the pH in each of them. Lots of truly investigable questions were generated from this activity. Here are some examples:
* What would happen to the pH if you mixed some of the substances?
* How do you measure the pH of thick substances (i.e. jello, chocolate syrup)
* Would different flavors of soda have different pH levels?
Be sure to check out a few of the pictures from today's activity.
Have a wonderful weekend!!!!!!
