Welcome to Numbers Big & Small! We really enjoyed the enthusiasm of your children today. Their contributions to our math discussions were impressive!  We briefly discussed how we know students are coming to math class from different schools, grades, and background knowledge. We are having fun, and playing with, math!

This week, in Numbers Big & Small:
We are thinking like mathematicians, experiencing numbers everywhere, and applying them in our daily lives.  The students are exploring really big numbers (1 million +) and really small decimal numbers.  We are delving into practical mathematical concepts such as area, perimeter, measurement, place value, rounding, estimation, prime numbers, fractions, data, and order of operations in the real world.  Each day we will have “Would You Rather?” math questions where students choose and defend their stance, work on logic problems, and explore math in famous art. We will have math read-alouds, Kahoots/Blookets, card games, activities, projects, and discussions.

This morning, we played a few math games to get to know each other. One involved clues about ourselves which all included numbers. (For example: I am 136 cm tall. My address is 2045. I visited 3 foreign countries….) Today we discussed the confusion from The Phantom Tollbooth where Milo is looking for the largest number, and the Mathemagician misunderstood with a giant-sized number 3.  Then, we read Math Curse and How Big is a Million.

The Ole Miss Math Department has a weekly math contest where students from all over the world answer the questions.  We viewed the elementary problem and attempted to solve it as a class.  “You were asked by your math teacher to subtract eight from a certain number and then divide the result by 10.  By mistake, you subtracted ten from the given number and then divided the result by eight giving a final answer of 102.  What would your answer have been if you had followed the directions correctly?”  We collaborated on the problem and discussed our ideas on how to solve it. The students have not come to a consensus for a solution yet, so we will try strategies to solve it again tomorrow.

Our first “Would You Rather” question asked, “Would you rather have $1.50 for every month or $.05 for every day?” Our second focused on the perimeter and the length of a bedroom.  We were so pleased with the rationalizations the students had for their choices!

We calculated that the strip of paper from one length of the room to the front table had about 8,800 squares. Again, the students shared their strategies for calculating the number of squares.  We then estimated how many squares it would take to cover the whole floor.

At the end of the day, we played a class Kahoot on place value.  We are looking to more games tomorrow as we ran out of time this afternoon!

Dinner table questions:

We look forward to tomorrow!

Warmly,