Wednesday, Day Thirty-seven

I just realized how long this unit is in 4th grade math. Today the students worked with the facts of 11 and 12. Their assignment consisted of them getting an email from me and completing an assignment. They had to finish a multiplication table (11 and 12 products were missing) but as I told them at this point they have done the whole table already. The 11's offered some strategies to introduce. One is when you multiply by a single digit number you just write that number twice. The other is the drop in strategy when using 2 digit numbers. It is really a great tool. All you do is separate the number you are multiplying like 11 x 45, would look like 4 5. Then add the numbers together and drop that sum in the middle 495 and that is your product. It works with any 2 digit number. You may have to carry with certain numbers such as 59. It would be 5 9. Then the sum is 14, so you drop in the 4 and carry the 1. So the product is 649. And it works with some division such as 253/11. You can see that the sum of the first and the last digit equal the middle digit so the quotient is 23. The students caught on to this real well. They had to use the multiplication table they had completed to solve multiplication and division equation with a factor of 12, then the drop-in strategy for equations with a factor of 11.

In 3rd grade we finished up some workbook pages that will help them in their upcoming exam. We will be having a final phonics exam in this class that will include about 25 of the 48 words they have learned. I am only looking to see that they have understood the pattern, so I am only pulling a few words from the list. I still intend to make a contraction game like we did the long i sound. They need a lot of practice with contractions and this would be very helpful to them.

Again time did not allow to work with my little guy. I have made flashcards with numbers on them to see what he can identify just by seeing them. Hopefully tomorrow we can do that. He has come a long way. I do expect that he will be retained but it would be the best for him, to get that extra time to learn.