Wednesday, Day Thirty-two

Today we finally got to start our new unit in 4th grade math. I gave the students a pre-test. They were concerned in the beginning because it was a test. I reassured them that this is not a graded test, this is for me to see what kind of background knowledge you have and I can use this to direct my instruction. They were still very concerned. Terminology is still something we are working on. I found out in the last unit if I repeat everything at the beginning of each lesson they will get it. A quick review doesn't disrupt the lesson and it is very helpful. We are studying multiplication and division facts. This lesson will not be difficult since they have learned most of the multiplication tables all ready. This unit gives student a variety of strategies to complete multiplication or division equations. Strategies such as the one used today, inverse operation. Students are used to checking their addition with subtraction and vice versa, so today they understood how division undoes multiplication and serves as a checking device also. I have a fact family bingo game if we have time tomorrow we are going to try it. This game will reinforce their knowledge of what a fact family is and inverse operations. We will see how it goes.

I am really enjoying the 3rd grade Language Arts class. We are studying a story about Indian traditions this week. Students have been working with contractions in the past two lessons, but are still having some difficulty. I remember a website that has an exercise in contractions, I may have the students work on that tomorrow. Today after we finished our lesson we played a card game with the long i sound. I have about 30 long i words, using the spelling pattern we are studying on index cards. It's kind of like go fish. I made each student a list of all the words that are on the cards and they have to ask another student for a matching word with the same spelling pattern as they have. If they find a match they lay down the pair, if not they draw another card. The first student who is out of cards wins. They seem to like it somewhat. Some of my students have social issues and are not very fond of this but they are participating. I think this will reinforce the spelling patterns we have been studying.

My little guy is doing very well with the TOUCH math. He will now count the points if he doesn't know the number without any thing being said. He recognizes 5 numbers without having to count the points. His alphabet recognition is doing better also. He can recongize 20 of the 26 letters and 18 sounds. He consistently missing the letters: g, h, and q. I need to find a way to get past this. He looks forward to our little execise. I am not sure if it is just to get it over or if he really like it. We do talk about different things during our exercise, but I have to be careful that we don't get too far off course. He is doing very well . My ST tells me he can see the difference our work is making.