Get Ready to Exercise!: Update 9/24-9-28

Maybe we will incorporate a study of football with math this year!

Hi 5V Math Families!

We've been busy counting marbles, making ice tea, standing on one foot, and now we're going to do some exercise. Our class loves to use authentic data to visually represent and then analyze. The kids are improving their scientist capabilities by interpreting data in a more mature fashion.

Here is what we are up to this week:

Monday 9/24: W will finish constructing box and whisker plots for school wide marble data and we will analyze the data by making interpretations. 

Tuesday 9/25: Ice Tea Day: We are going to use problem solving decision making strategies based on studying rate and needs analysis to purchase the amount of supplies at varying costs for the ice tea business. The kids will also establish a price for the drink based on the cost to produce. Eventually, we are going to visually represent the data as per our standards this unit! 

Wednesday 9/26: Line Graphs! We are going to study the relationship between rest time and pulse rate! So, let's see if those heart rates rise with less and less rest between exercise. 

Thursday 9/27: Small Group Day: I have some friends to see. Based on the quizzes, I am going to help our math friends with long division, long multiplication, and mean absolute deviation! The kids made awesome histograms by the way! 

Friday 9/28: Small Group Day 2 and finish Ice Tea Day work from Tuesday! 

Please ask your child about the Edline learning portal. We are going to do online learning through it. There are resources there for your child to use in order to learn and study. I will also post some HW this week on Edline. Kids will also have math discussions this week on Edline. 

Visual Representations and Ice Tea: Update 9/17-9/21

Hey 5V Math Families,

Here is what we are up to in math class this week:

Everyone is so excited to get to math class! 

Monday: We will study what histograms really reveal, how to read data from a histogram and we will learn how to create our own histograms with data we have collected. We have information about how many marbles each May Watts classroom has earned thus far.

Tuesday: We will have a day of small group lessons. I will use information to enrich and/or re-teach lessons and concepts to select children. The students will continue to finish their histograms and learning of why we use histograms.

Wednesday: We will learn how data is viewed and revealed through a box plot. We will begin learning what lower quartile and upper quartile means in a set of data. There is an image resource for the box plot HW on Edline. 

Thursday: We will learn how to construct our own box plots. We will use data collected from the "May Watts Classroom Marble Count" to reveal data in our box plots.

Friday: Ice Tea Day! The students will study rates and determine the most economic price to buy their ice tea supplies at. In addition, the students will set a sales price for the sale of their ice tea, once they calculate the production price for making it.

Data, Statistics, and Plots: Update 9/10-9/14

Last week's math classes were great! The kids studied measures of center, measures of variability, how to represent data on a dot plot and they spent time problem solving.

Alert: Please tell your child not to go forth with the mean absolute deviation homework I assigned.  If they already have that's fine but I am going to give them some slightly different work. 

Here's what's on tap for this week:

Monday: The kids are going to get an introduction to Blackboard. This is an online learning portal in which students will watch video lessons at home or in school. They have usernames and passwords and will be expected to watch lessons at home prior to arriving at school for the day's work. The kids will review finding median with an even numbered data set and they will also review finding mean absolute deviation. I will meet with kids in small groups.

Tuesday: There's no formal math acceleration course today because of CBM testing, BUT that doesn't mean the math will stop. The kids in 5V will study math in the context of the 2012 Election. We'll be looking at our country elects its President by beginning a study of the Electoral Map.

Wednesday: We will begin our first Ice Tea Day. These Ice Tea Days are meant to apply the standards we are learning through an imaginary ice tea business. The kids will create an ice tea recipe, study how many ingredients they'd have to purchase and at what rates. They'll collect information/data about their purchasing, creation, and other ice tea businesses and plot the data. The kids will study rates, data collection, analysis, representation, and visualization through out the process.

Thursday: The kids will study histograms and differentiate them between bar graphs. They'll eventually represent authentic data from the ice tea data on histograms.

Friday: The kids will study steam and leaf plots and understand how to plot data on the steam and leaf plots. 

Welcome to the 5V Math BLOG: Update 9/5-9/7

Watch very carefully...keep watching...

Greetings 5V Math Family Students. My name is Mr. Vaid and I will be your child's math teacher this year. Math begins at 9:30am and ends at 10:30am each day, M-F of the school week. At our curriculum night, next Thursday, 9/13 (more times forthcoming) you will learn more about the Common Core Math Curriculum our School district and many other school districts across the nation are putting into place this year.

Anyway, here is a brief update on what we'll be studying this week:

Wednesday 9/5: We will learn what statistical questions are and we will differentiate between them and other types of questions. Students will also write statistical questions and interpret them.

Thursday 9/6: The students will learn how to create what's called a dot plot and they will also see the benefits of creating dot plots. In addition, we will study measures of center including mean, median, and mode, and we will study outliers. 

Friday 9/7: We will wrap up the week by studying measures of variability including range and mean absolute deviation.

For the following week, we will continue to practice problem solving strategies such as guess and check, work backwards, and draw a table. We'll study these with specific problems. In addition, we will begin our thematic ice tea project.