SOLs Covered: 6.CE.2 Fraction Operations
Math Unit: 06 Fraction Operations
Daily Agenda: November 11-15, 2024
Upcoming Assessments: SUM Quiz 6 Fraction Operations (Mon. 11/25)
Good afternoon! It's been another fun filled week of math here at Carver but as always, I still have quite a bit to do before I can call it a day and close out the week and I'll again attempt to make this a quick update (I'm sure you've noticed by now that I'm not always good at that and have a tendency to get carried away). This week we've been tackling multiplication of fractions. We started off with just a basic reminder of multiplication of whole numbers before exploring multiplying fractions by a whole number. This part has been fairly easy for most of the kids, especially when modeling with fraction bars or circles.
Most of the week has been spent on multiplying a fraction by another fraction though, which definitely gets more complicated. We started the work by modeling, which can be fairly time consuming as it's a lot of meticulous drawing and switching between colors to illustrate the two different fractions. I requested that the school get us blue and pink highlighters to help with this for several reasons. These are the colors that are available virtually on the actual SOL test, so it will help when going between the online test to their scratch paper with keeping track of the problem. You can see an example of this on page 2 of the backup notes, but there are also several answer keys published on Canvas for our work, though they are unfortunately not all complete as I haven't had enough time to convert everything from their original format to Google Drive (the last time I taught 6th grade was before the district switched over to Google). The other reason for the color choice is that these are colors that mix well and the area they mix for this topic (the purple area) is where the solution to their answer lies.
It's not required, but I definitely recommend that students have their own set of pink and blue highlighters for working at home or outside of my class. They can of course have other colors, but I find that if students have the same colors to what I'm using in class, they tend to have an easier time following along. We practice most of our topics with the highlighters now that they've arrived and for our visual learners, it can be a huge help with keeping things straight.
Between the complexity of the topic and today's field trip along with a higher than average absence rate, I've had to push back our graded exit ticket several times, but it will now be on Monday and we should then introduce division. I'm still hoping to give the quiz that Monday (finishing Tuesday as needed) prior to the fall break, but I'll let you know in next week's update if that will need to change.
Unsurprisingly, this updated yet again went a little longer than I initially set out to write, but it should cover everything for now. As always, please feel free to email if you have any questions or concerns. Have a great weekend!