Math Unit 1

First of all, I want to say thank you to all those that came out for our first IB/Math night. I hope that you now have a much better understanding of where we are going with things and why we are doing things the way that we are in math. Mr. Rich would be a fabulous person to talk to if you still have questions or were unable to make it out tonight. He would be more than happy to sit down and talk with you and show you some examples of what we are doing.

I do want to say, the majority of the kids are really getting what we are doing. We finished up unit 1 today with the district End of Unit Assessment and then the programs End of Unit performance assessment. Most of the kids did really well. By looking at their work, I was really able to see their thinking and how they are understanding all of this. The performance assessment really showed their thinking. Let me give an example, let's say the kids were asked to solve 9 x 9. One of the ways that the students solved it was by finding 9x10 and then taking 9 away from that to get 81. They are learning how to use the math combinations (we don't call them facts any longer) they KNOW to solve the combinations that they do not know. Throughout this unit we have talked a lot about arrays, products, factors, square numbers, and multiples. Ask your child about these words and have them show you what they are. It isn't enough to just know a definition, the kids need to be able to know what that means and how it looks.

We will be starting Unit 2 tomorrow and moving away from multiplication in the classroom for a couple of weeks. We do encourage you to continue to work on those unknown combinations at home because we will be coming back to that in Unit 3. Unit 2 involves graphing and surveying so many different math concepts come out during this unit. We will continue the Friday quizzes to make sure the kids are staying up to date on what we have done so far and not letting things go just because we may not be focusing on it in class.

We will continue to work with those that are not quite getting it to help them to catch up. I have spend some one on one time with several students as well as has Mr. Jerome when he is in our room. We will be starting tutoring up in a few weeks so several of our students will have the opportunity to participate in that. I will be contacting you via email or letters home to let you know if we would like to have your child involved. Thank you so much for all you do!!