Math and Science Week of January 5th

Welcome back friends and family to 2015!  We hope you had a wonderful holiday break and feel refreshed and restored!  It is time to get back to school, work, and fun!

This week in Math we will study pictographs, bar graphs, tally charts, and dot plots.  The students will start the week out on Tuesday reading a simple pictograph where each symbol only means one.  Starting Wednesday, the key for each symbol will mean something different like below:

Our kids are required to first label, and then answer a series of questions based upon the information provided.  Such as:

1. Which two boys have a sum of 27?

2. How many few pencils does Mike have than Henry?

3. How many pencils do George and Henry have?

4. Which two boys have a difference of 3?

5. How many pencils are in this pictograph?

The kids will also have to become very familiar with bar graphs and how to decipher the scale on each one.  Some bar graphs are created with a scale of five or ten, but other more complicated bar graphs have scales of nine or twelve.  All the bar graphs below have different scales.

 

The kids will of course learn how to read and transfer data from tally charts and dot plots to bar graphs and pictographs and vice versa:

      

We are BACK TO FAST FACTS this week already!  Your kids will bring home their last facts facts test from December this Tuesday.  Please take 5-10 minutes a night to master whatever level your child is on in multiplication.  It is a major stepping stone to success in 4th grade math.  There will be a FF test this Friday.

There will NOT be a Problem of the Week (POTW).

In Science we are starting a new unit on weathering and erosion!  We will begin the unit by watching a Science video on how rocks are made from weathering.  What is weathering?  Weathering is the breaking down of rocks.  We will study the agents of weathering such as wind, water, air, people, etc... This will lead to further discussion towards the end of the week about soil.  Soil is created from weathered rocks as well as dead plants and animals.  We hope to get in the four types of soil by the end of the week and which soil is best to plant crops in.

It's going to be a fast and short four day week with LOTS of learning!

Love, Ms. S