Week of February 20th

Field trips, assemblies, and holidays hit the TAAP program this week.  For those 2nd grade classes I DID see, we continued our work with the Mayan number system.  The system is a base 20 system, so the kids had a lot of fun moving the dots (ones), bars (fives), and shells (zeroes) into the ones place, twenties place, and four hundreds place using the SmartBoard. 

Third graders continued an exploration of algebraic thinking.  This week, we tackled the notion that sides of an equation need to balance.  On the SmartBoard we looked at several problems using shapes.  The kids had some great discussions surrounding the problems.  Ideas such as “if a circle and two rectangles weigh the same as a circle and a triangle, then the triangle must weigh the same as the two rectangles” were explored.

Fourth graders started mapping the concepts from their research project  using the program “Inspiration”.  More research to come….!