Figurative Language, Resolutions, Multiplication
January 9, 2013 | Posted in: Class Updates
I hope 2013 is off to a good start for you all! I’ve made a simple resolution for myself: to stop writing 2012 every time I need to write the year. 🙂 It’s good to be back in school, and we’ve certainly hit the ground running! Before vacation, we worked quite a bit on writing summaries and making connections to text. We are taking a brief hiatus from these skills to work on figurative language. Figurative language falls under the umbrella of Author’s Craft and is a type of writing that helps to grab the reader’s interest and to “pull” him or her into the story. It helps the reader to imagine what is actually happening in the text. Before break, we worked with alliteration and hyperbole. Earlier this week, I introduced similes. The kids did a terrific job on the figurative language homework assignment this week, and I really enjoyed hearing and reading so many of their paragraphs! Last week, the students wrote New Year’s resolutions, which I hope to have on display for you next week. Coming up: onomatopoeia, personification, and idioms.
Last week, we started a new math unit that focuses on large numbers and multiplication. After reviewing place value, we worked on strategies to round and estimate sums and products involving larger numbers. One of our big concepts was that the way you round depends on your PURPOSE. Some purposes require more precision in rounding than others. For example, if you need a precise count of the number of people at a baseball game so that you can order prizes, perhaps you’ll need to round to the tens or hundreds place. On the other hand, if you are trying to estimate how many seats are in a baseball stadium, rounding to the nearest thousand may be good enough. We also talked about the idea of being a RESPONSIBLE estimator and that some methods of rounding may be technically accurate but might give misleading results. (For example, if I drove 41, 44, 49, 48, and 51 miles on each of the five days of the work week, I could round to the nearest hundred before adding the numbers up (0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 100) and get an “estimate” of 100 miles traveled. While mathematically sound, the estimate is highly inaccurate.
Now, we have moved on to different strategies for multiplication. I explained to the students that parents often prefer to teach the traditional method for multiplying numbers and that this can often appear to be at-odds with the Partial Products Method, which we use in class. But I reminded them that EITHER method will be acceptable, BUT that I want them to learn a variety of strategies so that they can make an informed choice about which strategy works best for the way they think.
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