Tuesday, December 13, 2011

I am going to add to the blog, but here is a link to an analog clock that the students may find useful when reviewing the concept of time.  http://www.teachingtimeclock.com/analogue-clock-teaching-time-iwb-resource.php

As I mentioned from last week, there were a number of students who had difficulty with this concept.  I have been explaining to the class that understanding time is a life skill and there are a number of students, in the regular stream who can't read an analogue clock.  This expectation is meant to be achieved by the time the students are done Grade 4 in the Measurement strand of Mathematics.  By the time the students complete Grade 5, they should be able to understand the concept of elapsed time.  This is the area which seemed to confuse the students the most and will be reviewed in class on Wednesday.

There is a lot of basic and important Math in learning to tell time.  As I mentioned before, fractions figure prominently (1/4 past, 1/2 past, 1/4 to) and the operations of adding, subtracting, and division.  Many of the students had issue with the way a half an hour is represented.  Consider the following:

Many of the students who understand this as 4:30 thought the hour hand should be on the 4.  However, each portion of the hour is divided into 5 sections which equals 12 minutes.  When it is 4:30, the hour hand is slightly past the half way mark between the 4 and 5.  This was explained using the following diagram:

A review over the next couple of days will provide the students with another opportunity for a test on Friday.  In the meantime, ask your son or daughter how they did on the first test.

In order to take account of the seating plan of the class, I moved the Community Circle to a different format.  Each student will now have to come to the front of the class to share their thoughts.  Here is Johnson:

The Book Talks are entering the final stages of being prepared.  The class is working with Ms.Wills, using the Photostory program, to complete this project.  When we began this project, I helped the students by modelling how to take jot notes.  Now, the students are taking the jot notes and creating paragraphs for the beginning, middle, and end of the book they read.  I did a rough draft of how the beginning of my book might look:

I have since completed another draft and will model, for the class, how I will put the project together.  They will see the jot notes, the images selected from the Internet, and the "new" script I will read.

On Monday, we spent a double period working with our Kindergarten partners on some seasonal crafts.  Here are some of the images: