TGS Grade 5 2011-2012

We’ve had a busy few days. Between concert rehearsals and a tiring Tuesday night, we’ve been learning to program our Lego NXT robots, revising creative James and the Giant Peach chapters, and developing our division algorithm skills.

In our robotics unit, students have learned some basic programming. Each student has worked through a series of fundamental skill building exercises and learned to instruct vehicles to travel away and back, in a square, and in a triangle route. Students have also practiced programming loop and sequence. In the process, students have been actively using the terms degree, rotation and percent. It’s great to hear the language of math being applied. In a short writing response to the project, students shared the following observations.

• “We are doing this project to learn exactitude and measurement.”
• “We are doing this because it is fun hard science and problem solving.”
• “We’re doing this project so we can think like scientists think every day.”
• “We are learning about exact action and why action needs to be exact.”
• “We are learning engineering.”
• “We’ve encountered lots of trouble but we’ve worked with partners to solve some of the problems and move on to the next challenge.”
• “We are doing this to get better at math and problem solving.”
• “I think we’re doing this project because it’s fun for us to work on and solve problems and it is helping us to work together.”

I couldn’t ask to work with a more enthusiastic and thoughtfully engaged group.

In math, we’ve been learning to apply an estimation division algorithm. For some students, this has been a relatively easy task made especially easy with single digit divisors and strong multiplication fact recall. For others, the process has been facilitated using estimation and friendly multiples. Our work has been complimented by hands-on division exercises. We’ve used decimal blocks to trade, regroup, and distribute. This has proven a satisfying and grounding activity.

Generally speaking, students who struggle with division at an abstract level are struggling with automaticity of multiplication fact recall. The struggle signifies the importance of frequent multiplication review. Please take a few minutes, every few days, to toss out a number of random multiplication questions. If your child hesitates in naming the product, I advise giving the correct answer as a way to reinforce the correct answer.