A Great Start

We're off to a great start in 4th grade! The new 4th graders have adjusted well to switching classes and teachers throughout the day and we're getting to know each other. What an awesome bunch of kids! I'm so excited to spend this school year with them!

The 4th graders will learn lots of new math skills this year, and we will build upon skills they have already learned in previous years. I have been reading and researching about the best ways to teach math. Of course, when you can make learning and practicing skills fun that always helps. One way to do that is by using puzzles and games. Greg Tang is a math guru that has created some math picture books, games and puzzles. He has a website that you might want to check out: gregtangmath.com. 

We have been spending a few minutes at the beginning of each math class period doing a Greg Tang puzzle or game. Some of them require mental math, an important real-world skill. The one below is NumTanga. Ask your favorite 4th grader to tell you about it.

Here are some other ways we warm-up our brains at the beginning of math class. The 4th graders love these challenge picture equations!

They also love figuring out these "24 cards". You have to use all the numbers on the card to make the number 24. You can add, subtract, multiply and divide. Can you figure this one out?

Scrumptiously Simplified Fractions

The fourth graders have been busy learning about fractions. We've talked about equivalent fractions and simplifying fractions. To get some extra practice with these skills we did an activity on Friday with M & M's and Skittles. They had fun counting their candy, recording the fractions and reducing them to simplest form. Of course, the best part was eating the candy! :)

Question of the Week

This week we started something new...Question of the Week! The fourth graders used the iPads to scan the QR code and access Padlet.com to answer the question. We talked about making sure we wrote in a complete sentence and used the correct capitalization and punctuation.  We will do some graphing activities with the information from Question of the Week each week.

QR code for our "Question of the Week" on Padlet.com

Our "Question of the Week" on Padlet.com

Order of Operations and Our Mini-lab

Order of Operations

Several of the fourth graders have completed our work on multi-digit multiplication and have moved onto learning about "Order of Operations". They watched the Math Antics video about Order of Operations and have begun working on solving equations using the order. Math Antics (mathantics.com) is one of my favorite "go-to" websites for math instruction. The kids love the videos on the website and are able to use the computers or ipads to watch the videos to learn a new skill or review a skill that they may need more practice on.

mathantics.com

Order of Operations video on mathantics.com

PEMDAS=Order of Operations

A fun way to remember the PEMDAS-Order of Operations!

A sample of the Order of Operations practice that some of the fourth graders are working on.

Our "Mini-Lab" :)

I brought a few unused laptops from home so that we can have our own mini-lab in our classroom. The kids are able to use them for Kidblog, Math Antics, FirstinMath, looking up spelling word definitions and SpellingCity.com...just to name a few uses for the laptops. 

Valentine's Day Activities

Yesterday was a busy day in fourth grade. In math we did some candy heart estimating. We talked about how useful the skill of estimating is in real-life. 

A fun Valentine's activity that we worked on the past few days was to make word clouds on the website imagechef.com. The fourth graders typed the things they love and chose the colors and fonts. 

What We're Doing

Today the fourth graders took a quiz in math class, but they also did some math problem solving in the form of word problems, Sudoku and Equato puzzles. 

This week the fourth graders enjoyed practicing their basic math facts 

by playing "Sumology" and "4-Way Countdown".

Dividing and Blogging

Division, specifically "long division with remainders", is the topic of study right now in math for all of the fourth graders. Because the algorithm can sometimes be confusing and pretty abstract, we have been using drawings, chips and base ten blocks to help us with dividing numbers.

Yesterday we used the website mathplayground.com. This is a great website for practicing math skills. We used "Dare to Share Fairly" on our whiteboard to practice division with remainders. It provides a great visual for the students to see the numbers being divided into groups.

Any extra practice at home on division would be very helpful! Division flashcards, math games on the computer as well as apps on iPads, iPods or phones are some suggestions.

Has your fourth grader told you about our Kidblog yet?  They are beyond excited about it! Kidblog is an online blogging tool for classrooms.  I used it with my first graders at Morning Sun Elementary for several years, so I knew the fourth graders at Mediapolis would do very well with it.  I introduced the kids to it last week and showed them how to log in on the iPads and they caught on very quickly!

The exciting thing about blogging is that the students' writing isn't hidden in a notebook in their desks at school. It is visible for others to read and comment on. We talked about reading each other's writings and leaving positive comments for each other. For their first posts the students were asked to use some of their spelling words.  Their writing isn't perfect, but it will give them the opportunity to work on their editing skills. 

I welcome you to check out our Kidblog and leave comments if you'd like! All posts and comments go through me first for approval. So, if you don't see your child's post or a comment you've left, that means it hasn't been approved or published yet.

We will continue to use Kidblog to write about various different topics. Stay tuned for next week's fun Kidblog posts! :)

https://kidblog.org/class/Mepo4-W