Thursday, December 3rd Update
Good evening, everyone!
I was really impressed with the work begun yesterday on technology timelines, which will help us see the changes in types of technology over time. We talked today about how these changes are related to the Engineering Design Process that we were using when making Rube Goldberg machines. Things keep changing and people keep adapting technology over time to suit their needs! If anyone needs some time on these tomorrow, we can have a short period in the morning to finish.
Today we marked math work from Distance, Rate, and Time worksheets. We also talked about time conversions in these problems, which involved changing minutes to hours, fractions to decimals, and decimals to fractions. We talked about how it is important to better understand math vocabulary to truly understand the concepts behind math computations. For example, we made synonyms for the word “decimal” and understood it to mean a part, piece, portion, section, or fraction (among other words) of a whole number. For those students who want an advanced math challenge, I provided the University of Waterloo’s advanced word problems on Distance, Rate and Time. For all students, I provided a practice sheet on adding, subtracting, multiplying and converting decimals, which is appropriate for learning and review in the grade 4 and 5 curriculum. This work is being done in class for now. If anyone is having difficulty with decimals and fractions as we talk together, I have posted some websites for practice and review under Articles of Interest in the Math Section.
After music class today, we had time to discuss our new TUNING IN articles. Five articles from our Articles of Interest page under Machines should be read and reflected upon by December 11th, Friday. Parents, if you can also please take a moment to reflect with your child, it helps for them to see and to read your perspective, as well. I provided sheets for the reflections in their yellow duotangs. Please document the name of the article, the website it is from, and the author of the article, using the format I showed you in class.
Finally, some other notes:
- The Burnaby Art Gallery Workshop notice is due by Dec. 11th. Please bring them in ASAP so they don’t get lost during this busy holiday season.
- The Movie at Metropolis activity for Dec. 14th Monday blue notice went home today, and please pay and bring back asap. Thank you!
- The 12 Days of Christmas written assignment is due tomorrow and we will be sharing them aloud in class. Tomorrow we will also do the skits which keep getting delayed!
- Sentence Detective Packets need to be either finished or just reviewed. They were assigned yesterday in class, but I saw many errors upon my return. I have asked students to review them again. We really need to work on run-on sentences, transition words, and making complex sentences through conjunctions.
- Please comment on the posts I made on the blog about your favourite book and what you think about tech etiquette, as this will be our topic of discussion tomorrow.
- Tomorrow Henry’s Dad, Lei, is going to come and speak to us about his work as an engineer! Thank you for volunteering to come in and share your work and Power Point presentation!
Have a good night! Look for Ms. D to wear button #21 tomorrow! 🙂