Gamelan Guests

Today in school we had a remarkable group of musicians and dancers come to visit. The group, known as Gamelan Sekar Jaya introduced Gamelan music to all the students at BAM. Gamelan originates from Indonesia, and the group that visited today has members from Bali. You can check them out and see and hear them on their website.

Our schedule was a little off today because of the assembly, but we were still able to make it to the Library and had some time for Math and Langauge Arts. In math we worked with modeling story problems with open number sentences. An open number sentence is a math problem with one part missing that is expressed by a variable. For example, for the question “If a Gamelan group had 3 kenong, 4 bonang and 2 kendang, how many instruments do they have in total?” the open number sentence would be 3 + 4 + 2 = N where N is a variable that stands for the total number. If the question were instead, “A Gamelan group has 12 instruments including 6 kempul, 2 gongagend and some gambang. How many gambangs do they have if the only types of instruments the group has are kempul, gongagends and gambangs?” the open number sentence would be 6 + 2 + G = 12 where G is a variable that stands for the number of gambangs. While this all may bring terrifying flashbacks to algebra, try to keep a positive attitude about it as you work with or talk to your children. A positive attitude can go a long way in promoting confidence and comfort with an academic subject.

Homework:

1. Language Arts: Vocabulary Word Match (The prefixes at the top include a typo and are the prefixes for the next set of vocabulary. Replace the prefix in- with re- if you would like to.)
2. Mathematics: Page 33 Study Link Worksheet: Addition and Subtraction open number sentences.
3. Reading: Read for 20 minutes. (No reading log entry tonight.) I kept the reading logs in class until tomorrow so that we can go over how to fill them out together. Many students have been incorrectly recording parts of the log, so I wanted to spend a moment to review procedures before the logs are sent out again.

Mr. Weis