Viewing: rounding
November 4, 2018
Methodical Math Mania!
In room 209, we have been working hard on a variety of different math skills. In our current unit, which we’ll be assessing this week, students have learned about factors, multiples, the order of operations, patterns, problem solving, and more. I hope that the videos I’ve posted are helpful to you, both in keeping you up to date on what skills we’re covering and in better equipping you to support your fourth grader. Students have been working very hard in math.
Our first math unit focused on place value, addition, and subtraction. You may be wondering about the unit 1 assessment scores. When I review student assessment results, I look to see what strengths emerged and which areas were challenging for students. When I see that a few students have struggled with a particular area, I pull groups to review the difficult skills. When the number of students struggling with a skill is larger, it shows me that I need to do some reteaching for the whole class. On the unit 1 assessment, I saw that the majority of students continued to need practice with rounding and with a few other place value skills. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing various skills with small and large groups of students, and we’re going to continue this work to ensure that students have a solid foundation for our upcoming units. So while these assessments haven’t gone home yet, I look forward to reviewing them with you in person at our upcoming parent conference so we can discuss your fourth grader’s progress.
We’re also working on improving students’ addition and subtraction facts. Students are making progress in these skills, but this may also be a good focus for home practice. This may come as a surprise for you, as the big focus in third grade was multiplication. Fear not, we’ll soon return to multiplication facts as we dive into the multiplication units of study. But I often find that students’ addition and subtraction fact mastery tends to slip when they shift their focus to multiplication. So by taking the first marking period to work on addition and subtraction facts, I’m again hoping that students will have a solid basis for the skills in the upcoming units of study.
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 14, 2017
Rounding Numbers (Help with Homework)
Today was rounding day! Students spent a lot of time working on this challenging skill. We started working on rounding numbers yesterday, and today’s focus was rounding numbers to different place values. For example, 24,829 can be rounded to the nearest ten-thousand (20,000), the nearest thousand (25,000), the nearest hundred (24,900), or the nearest ten (24,830). It took a lot of hard work for students to begin to feel comfortable with how to round to different places. So while they worked on their worksheet (which they’re finishing for homework), I made this video to help them (and parents) tonight! Enjoy!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 14, 2016
Day 9: What’s happening?
It feels as if we’ve been in school for many weeks! The students are doing a great job learning the routines of our class, and this has allowed us to move into our curriculum with efficiency and enthusiasm! Our first focus in reading has been discussing many of the strategies that successful readers use. We’ve discussed how readers choose books for themselves, why some readers abandon books, and how to use our class library. This afternoon, we’re going to again team up with Ms. Kelleher, our library-media specialist, to learn about how to choose a “Just Right” book for ourselves. This will be helpful as we find students’ independent reading levels in the coming weeks. Yesterday, we learned about how to “buzz”, that is, how to have a group conversation about a single topic. You might be surprised to hear that we’re focusing on something so fundamental, but we’ve found in fourth grade that dedicating time NOW to discussing the basic ideas of taking turns, making eye contact, etc. allows student discourse down the road to be significantly more productive and engaging.
Click to enlarge!
In math, we’ve been working on place value! Our first few lessons introduced place value concepts and built upon the students’ prior skills. Today, we worked on rounding numbers; a concept that we’ll spread out over a few days. Estimation can be a challenging skill for students, so I teach them the roller coaster strategy. (See picture.) This method lets students break up the rounding process into five steps, and by adding a visual piece, it makes it less overwhelming for many learners. Feel free to show this image to your fourth grader to help them with their homework. Tomorrow, we’ll translate this strategy to a more traditional process in which they round numbers without the elaborate visual process. We’ll return to the roller coaster method when we work on rounding to different places, such as taking a number like 8,372 and rounding to the nearest thousand (8,000) or nearest hundred (8,400) or nearest ten (8,370). I don’t expect mastery on day one, and I admire the hard work students are showing!
We’ve started our Targeted Instruction rotations! As I explained at curriculum night, TI will allow us to meet each student’s individual needs by breaking up classes. For example, during the TI block one week, I might focus on rounding numbers, Mrs. Castle might focus on descriptive writing, and Miss Lacasse might focus on map skills. Rather than whole classes traveling together, we’ll each send our students to the teacher who is offering the activity that best fits student needs. We’re excited to have many different teachers collaborating with us, so stay tuned! This week, students ARE rotating among each teacher as whole classes in order to establish routines. Next week, we’re going to start to shuffle students.
Questions? Send me an email! Have a great day!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
September 16, 2014
Subtracting Whole Numbers (and Estimating Differences)
OnCore 4.21
CC 4.NBT.4
Posted in Learning Resources, Math, Unit 1|By Jon Moss