Thanks, students and parents, for a great year!
Have a great summer and please let me know if you have any questions at all about your summer work.
Here are some good websites to help when you need a reminder about a skill:

Classzone.com is our textbook website – the “Help with the Math” @home tutor section in the upper left corner is great:

http://www.classzone.com/cz/books/msmath_1_na/book_home.htm?state=OK

http://www.math-drills.com/

http://www.math.com/students/practice.html

We will be busy this last week of 5th grade as we connect fractions/decimals/percents. While we will not have a quiz, we will be practicing these skills with some hands-on activities. Throughout the year, we have stressed the importance of using math resources. This is an important student skill for all types of learning. Our "math notes" section of our binders will come home on Thursday. Please encourage your child to keep it as a reference. Summer packets will also come home Thursday. It is organized into 8 "skill sets" that will give your student practice and keep those skills "bubbling" over the summer. I encourage you to preview the packet together with your student, and come up with a plan that fits your summer schedule.

On Monday, all 5th graders will take the Iowa Algebra Aptitude test - an internal assessment of students' readiness for abstract thinking and reasoning. Placement decisions for on-level or enriched math will take place over the next two weeks. All parents will receive a placement letter with our recommendation. Factors determining placement are skill base, problem solving ability, responsibility, grades, and ERB scores. Students in the 6th grade on-level class will the book we have currently; the enriched class will use Course 2 in the series (the current blue 6th grade book).

Please feel free to call or email if you have any questions at all! Have a wonderful summer, and be on the lookout - you never know when you'll find a math moment!

Almost done!!
We will spend the last week exploring connections among fractions, decimals, and percents. There will be a graded assignment on these ideas next week - probably Wednesday.

To repeat, the skills on Friday's test are lines, angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, perimeter, area of rectangles, parallelograms, and triangles. We will be able to use geo-notebooks for the test. We have resources for each skill and concept!

The test has been moved to this Friday, May 8th. All geometry topics are on the test - lines, angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and also perimeter, area of rectangles, parallelograms, and triangles. Students will be able to use their geo-notebooks for the test. I will discuss in class how best to organize materials and emphasize again what a complete geo-notebook should contain.

Last Friday we did a hands-on activity to visualize and derive the formulas for areas of parallelograms and triangles. We will be practicing and problem-solving with area on Monday and Tuesday.

Wednesday and Thursday are double-block days because of the dissection. Matthews/Koening have two periods of math Wednesday; Timko/Durling have two periods of math Thursday. On the double block days, we will organize our resources, do some practice/study activities, and take the Protractor/Ruler section of the test. Students will be required to draw and measure angles, and also to use a ruler to sketch diagrams of lines, angles, and polygons. This activity will take about 15 minutes at most.

Two hands-on activities help us discover two important triangle properties - one about side lengths and one about angle measurements. We will classify triangles using some familiar vocabulary words, and use a family tree analogy to help us understand how to classify quadrilaterals. Perimeter and area of rectangles, parallelograms and triangles round out our geometry lessons, and we should be ready for a quiz on Tuesday May 5th. It is important that students keep their geonotebooks up to date!

Have you seen your student's geo-notebook? Ideas for this week are lines and angles. New concepts include vertical angles, supplementary angles, and complementary angles. We will learn a cool new skill - how to use a protractor!

This week the "easy" idea of reciprocals will be used to divide by fraction divisors. This is conceptually about as abstract as we can get, and these ideas will be seen again in 6th grade. The concept of division is our starting point to help us see that when you divide a number into smaller and smaller parts, you are able to get more of them. There are several kinds of fraction divisor applications, but we will limit our focus to one type. If I have a 24 inch long piece of wood for my science project, and I need to divide it into 1/2- inch pieces, how many pieces can I get? The answer is 48, which is actually larger than my dividend. This strikes students as odd, since with whole numbers, division makes things "smaller." Some students may actually make the connection that we approached dividing with a decimal divisor in the same way! (A great time to review that 24 divided by 0.5 is also 48.)

Even though the concepts are abstract, the algorithm is very straightforward, although keeping track of the many steps can be a problem at times. (How many parents remember "invert and multiply"? That's it!)

There will be a quiz on fraction divisors this Friday, April 17th. Then it's off to geometry land!

Lots of sweet activities during this short week! Because of our Gilcrease field trip and the Good Friday holiday, there will be just three math classes this week. Look for some special fraction food on Monday to help us understand, see, and taste "part of a part". We will type, print, and illustrate our recipe projects, and on Thursday, we will solve some "eggstra" sweet problems. Our last fraction operation - division - will begin with an exploration of reciprocals.

We will have a fraction multiplication QUIZ this Friday, April 3rd.
Types of skills: part of a whole (friendly fractions); part of a part (proper fraction factors); and mixed number multiplication.
Simplify before you multiply is important!!

First of all, there is an error on Friday's homework page. Finishing the "part of a part" problems is NOT homework. We will continue developing those ideas in class Monday. Please make sure to bring in a recipe - make sure it has at least 5 ingredients (ideally mostly fractions). Also make sure the recipe shows how much it makes. We will be describing a situation in which we need to adjust our recipes by multiplying by fractions. The rest of this week will be spent on multiplying by fraction and mixed number factors.
During skills time twice a week through the rest of the year, students will be working on practice/enrichment packets that will help solidify skills and stretch reasoning abilities.

We are headed back to fraction land for the next few weeks. Our first stop will be multiplying fractions. We will use our usual strategy of making connections to whole number multiplication. The big ideas this week are "part of a whole" and "part of a part". We will start by using sets of counters to model "groups of."

Coming soon to a 5th grade class near you - fraction food!

Enjoy your time off! Look for math moments!

We will be exploring division with decimal divisors. The homework over this weekend is to review/practice division computation with whole numbers and decimal dividends. If you are finding it hard to remember about dividends and divisors, please use your math notes to review! Pay attention to directions - make sure to express your quotient correctly. What does this mean? Either round your quotient to a certain place, or express the remainder as a fraction of the divisor.
We will learn all about dividing with decimal divisors this week, and have a quick quiz on Thursday, March 12th.
Here is a link to the division practice sheet if you were absent on March 6th.

After this Friday, we will be three-fourths finished with fifth grade! Wow! This week we will complete decimal multiplication with a quick quiz on Thursday. We are also doing some problem-solving activities. Division with decimal divisors will be our first unit for the last quarter.

With last week's quiz, we are finishing up introductory (but crucial) fraction concepts as well as addition/subtraction. However, there is one type of problem I purposely left out of our quiz because I think it deserves its own special examination. We started the idea of regrouping when subtracting mixed numbers last Friday and we are continuing this week. On Wednesday we will have a mini quiz - well, let's don't call it a quiz, it's just a check on regrouping using notes -just on this one topic.
To finish out the quarter, we will leave fraction land for a while while we explore decimal multiplication and division. The great thing is that these concepts connect perfectly with the metric measurement unit in science! If things go according to plan, we will be able to finish decimal multiplication by the end of the quarter, and division by spring break. Stay tuned, though, because things rarely proceed according to plan...

We will have a review session for the quiz Wednesday Feb. 18th right after school until 4:00. The quiz is on Thursday. Again, topics are LCM, comparing/ordering, adding/subtracting (proper fractions, mixed numbers, different denominators).

You can't add apples and oranges unless you call them fruit!
Parents, make sure to ask your student what that means.

A couple of 4 day weeks ahead! This week we will focus on adding/subtracting with different denominators - apples and oranges!
Our quiz date is next Thursday Feb. 19th - LCMs, comparing/ordering, adding/subtracting. Stay tuned for lots of quiz practice activities and for a review session.

Here's a link to a page on coolmath that is great to review our fraction ideas! We have studied ideas up through and including lesson 9; we will be doing addition and subtraction this week and early next week.
Try this link! It's cool!

http://www.coolmath.com/fractions/