Monday Dec. 12, 2011

Dear Friends,

One day down, 9 more to go until Winter Holidays!  First off, thank you to those students who helped make sure the class was well-organized for today.  The room looked spectactular when I walked in, with all chairs stacked, class library in-check, and tables with appropriate materials in bins. 

Congratulations to INAYA, our elected class "Prime Minister."  It was a tough race for our many class candidates, but Inaya's detailed speech, clear message and hard work won over the majority of the voters in the class.

There are a few homework notes and reminders for this week.  First, our usual Spelling (Unit 9) and Daily Math is due on Friday.  Second, the final Reading Letter of 2011 is due next Monday.  Third, we will continue thinking about Dance.  Please decide on a dance style (i.e. jazz, Bollywood) and begin to research (i.e. ask questions, read, talk to someone, think about) its history for Tuesday.

Finally, I hope that you and your parents have read the MATH LETTERS that were sent home today.  Practice is the name of the game when learning to add, subtract, multiply or divide.  We'll continue sharing mental math strategies like estimating, rounding, using "friendly" numbers and thinking about place value. 

SAMPLE MATH QUESTIONS:

Grade 4: Students from 2 schools went on a field trip.  There were 227 students in one school, and 134 students in the other school.  How many students went on the field?
(THINK MENTAL MATH STRATEGY: "friendly" numbers are rounded to the nearest ten or hundred because it is easier to work with numbers that end in 0)

Grade 5: Workers at the Portage Bicycle Factory make mountain bikes and racing bikes.  Last week, they made 2343 mountain bikes and 1998 racing bikes.  About how many bikes were made altogether?  Find the total number of bikes that were made.  Record your estimate and your sume.  How close was your estimate to the sum?
(THINK MENTAL MATH STRATEGY: "front-end estimation" is when you add the first digits of the numbers only)

Have a great week!
Ms. Perlmutter