Tuesday, September 30, 2008

New Month, New Calendar Math


Today is Wednesday, today is Wednesday, October 1st, October 1st. Yesterday was Tuesday, tomorrow will be Thursday, HIP-HIP HORRAY! What a day!
That is the sound of the beginning of our Calendar Math time. I love Calendar Math because I feel that it reinforces skills that students sometimes lack, plus IT'S FUN! I am so excited for the new month of October. In Calendar Math (CM), a new month = new components of our lesson. This month we have added many new components to our CM routine. We will be comparing the weather in Jacksonville, Florida (USA) to that of Cairo, Egypt (Africa). As a class, we will be graphing this information. Students will practice reading and answering the graph about weather. We will also be adding a decimeter (10 centimeters) each day of the month. This will provide the much needed skill of using metric measurement. Our calendar pattern this month introduces us to different types of triangles such as equilateral triangles and isoceles triangles. We will continue to add money for each school day. We will focus on the meaning of a.m. and p.m. in time. We will keep track of the different times that it is "light" (day) and "dark" (night) in relation to a.m. and p.m. We will also be finding different combinations of coins for a given total.
Some questions that you can ask your child about our CM lesson for October are:
Early in the month:
What is an equilateral triangle?
What is an isoceles triangle?
What is a vertice?
What is a decimeter?
How many groups of 10 equal 100?
Is today's number odd or even?
Is today's number a multiple of 3? 4? 5? 6? 7? etc. How do you know?
Mid-Month:
How many decimeters equal a meter?
What is the weather like in Cairo compared to Jacksonville at this time of the year?
What does it look like outside when it is 3 a.m.? 3 p.m.?
What are all the different combinations of coins to make 47 cents?

These are just a few questions that you could ask. You can even ask open ended questions such as "What did you learn today in CM?" Any conversation with your child about their work in class holds them accountable for paying attention during the lesson. Thanks for reading!!
-Miss Russell :)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you. That is so helpful to know what you'll be teaching, in detail, for the next month. I will definitely work on things at home with Elias. :)

Anonymous said...

hey miss russell,
all of that is true, we do do that miss russell.



keep blogging,amanda j.

Anonymous said...

You make math so engaging for the students! The activities you do with Calendar Math are very impressive and serve well to extend the students' knowledge! :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for such informative blogging! I check them daily just to see what is happening in the classroom and am able to reinforce/enrich those concepts throughout the week. Keep it coming! :>)

Mrs. Griffin