Valentine's Day Information

The sixth graders will celebrate Valentine's Day on Friday, February 13, 2015.  We have asked sixth graders to bring in valentines for students in 6K.  A class list was sent home in our last Friday Folder, and Mrs. Springer has extras too.  

We also discussed that each student will need a box to store his/her valentines in for the day.  Students have been asked to create a box at home and bring it in by Friday, February 15, 2015.  Boxes that excel in the following categories will be awarded a ribbon.  Students help think of the categories for 6K!  :) 

Ribbons will be awarded for the boxes that are the most...
funny, weird, colorful, creative, unique, valentine-y, small, personalized, sophisticated, realistic design, movie themed, and quantity of decorations used. 

Best of luck with your creations!

Timeline Presentations

Students will start their timeline presentations in Social Studies this week!  There is a rubric for the presentations and even a chance for students to earn extra credit by practicing at home (note, your child must obtain a parent signature).  Sixth graders will sign up for their presentation day on Monday, February 2.  

Writing Expressions All Week!

My apologies for the lack of blog postings this week---please know that we were BUSY with different math concepts!  Check out everything we investigated this week!

On Wednesday we worked with writing expressions that dealt with addition and subtraction.  This was a bit tricky to make sure the expressions always "said" what we were trying to achieve mathematically.  For instance, if we wanted the sum of h and w minus 11, students wrote "(h+w) - 11".

On Thursday we continued writing expressions but threw in some multiplication.  The sixth graders seemed to breeze right through matching expressions like "36lj" and "6 x 6 x l x j"  and even played a game of BINGO!  We discussed the vocabulary words "variable" and "coefficient". 

On Friday, we really kicked it up a notch and brought in division.  Let me tell you, nothing can stop these kids!  We were writing quotients and fractions and even using parentheses to have a quantity in the denominator!  Check out these slides from today!

Expressions & Exponents

In math today we tackled expressions and exponents!  Often sixth graders were thinking that the two expressions below were equal.  Today we investigated the difference between the two expressions as well as a review of exponents.  

Working with Expressions

Today we start our unit on expressions!  Students explored that the big difference between expressions and equations is that expressions do not have an equal sign.  Take a look at the examples below:

A expression would be:
5a + 7

An equation would be:
3a - 9 = 12

See the difference?!?  

Students also explored how the expression b + b + b + b can also be written as 4b.  Pretty cool, isn't it?  We will keep working with expressions during this whole unit.  Students will investigate with exponents, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in expressions and will also have a chance to evaluate some tricky expressions like they have seen in Study Island.  We will be busy in sixth grade for this unit!

Links for Wednesday

Did you finish today's activities with time to spare?  If so, check out some of the links below for fun Math games!

Sheppard Software
Probability Activity (works best with sound)

Links for Tuesday

Click here to go to the tutorial for the activity in class.  Remember that you are to select the "Grades 6-8" one.

When you finish, you may browse any of these links for the games we did not get to play during Math Workshop!

Boat Race with the Coordinate Grid
Perimeter Shape Shoot
Multiplication Arcade Game
Sheppard Software Math Games