Welcome Back!

Welcome back to school!  I hope everyone had a sunny restful week off.

We were very busy today and right back at things.
We took a deep dive into division today with a box of raisins.  There was a box of raisins for everyone to estimate how many delightful little pieces of fruit were inside.  After estimating we had a peek inside to see how many raisins were on the top.  Students were able to revamp their estimate based on what they could see.  After finding the range of our raisin box estimates and questioning why some boxes were fuller than others and exclaiming the unfairness of that concept we counted how many raisins in our boxes.  Interesting to me that some of us are still counting one by one while others are automatically putting things into groups of friendly numbers to organize thinking.  After grouping our raisins we talked about the strategies people used to arrive at their total.  Some of us counted by 2's while others counted by 10' and 5's.  We wrote sentences such as 4 groups of 5 with 2 leftovers and 6 groups of 4.  Table groups then determined how many raisins they had altogether and then divided out the raisins equally to everyone in our table group.  So much math in one little box of raisins and we are not done yet!

We began a novel study this afternoon by drawing artifacts from the story and making predictions based on what we saw.  Students had some great ideas and I can't wait to share one of my favorite chapter books with them!

Remember to read 20/10