Welcome to Monday and a new week, albeit another short one. We started the week off with our Monday Current Events reading with the newspaper. Students spent some time perusing the Chronicle and identifying articles they were interested in. We discussed the page numbering system and how to follow parts of an article from one page to another, and then students focused on one article and filled out an information sheet. We then had some sharing and learned about everything from last night’s Grammy Awards to the personal account of the airline captain who safely flew the flight a couple weeks ago into the Hudson River.
In writing, students continued their work on Response to Literature essays. We are containing to focus on organization and navigating a response path that includes elements of summary, opinion, and supporting quotations. Some students should be finishing their first draft of a new piece for homework today.
In mathematics we explored exponents and more specifically powers of 10 and scientific notation. As part of our work, we created charts of different “names” for 10, 100, and 1000. For example, the number 1,000 can be renamed as 10 x 100, 20 x 50, 200 x 5, 2000 x 0.5, 0.1 x 10,000, or many other ways. We discussed the shifting powers of 10, and then spent some time learning different prefixes and their corresponding powers of 10 (including milli- from our vocabulary word millimeter and its power of 10^-3).
In the middle of our discussion I brought up googols. Although these days “google” has taken on a very different meaning. Long before it was the name of a website, google was only known as a googol and probably most often thrown around my mathematicians and quiz show afficionados. Did you know that it is presumed that there is not a googol of any known object in the universe. Take a guess as to what it means and then follow the link or just google googol on your own. Also, check out the following video to get an explanation by Carl Sagan about googols and the even more elusive googolplex.
One note on the Social Studies podcast and rap. I had a few more pictures to add from one of the student groups, but the final product should definitely be up by tomorrow. Apologies for the delay.
Homework:
- Mathematics: Pages 147 and 149 – powers of 10 and scientific notation.
- Language Arts: Vivid Vocabulary sheet with new vocab words, Finish Draft of Response to The Dunes.
- Reading: Read for 20 minutes and fill out page in the brand new Pink Reading Log Notebooks!
Mr. Weis
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