Snowflakes and Decimals

We are on a modified traditional schedule.  This means that I am off from the Friday before Thanksgiving to the first regular day after New Year's Day.  I no longer do any holiday art.  I am also in California which means we don't know the first thing about the snow aspect of winter.  Because I sort of miss creating holiday art, I consoled myself with snowflakes yesterday.  I saw the snowflakes from Mor at A Teacher's Treasure and loved them!  My students enjoyed them yesterday too.  Because they were a bit more involved than I gave them time for, we'll be enjoying them on Tuesday morning as well!

 So, on to decimals.  This is totally a thank you post to Jennifer Runde.  Her awesome interactive math journal is well worth the investment.  The more I use foldables and journaling in math, the better my students get at producing and understanding.  We're finishing up with multiplying with decimals and heading to dividing with decimals.  Usually this worries me, and sets me up to be frantic during fractions, but I am not anxious at all this year.  We review every day.  We journal every day.  We refer to our foldable every day.  The students know what to do every day.  Easy peasy. 

On Mondays and Wednesday I introduce new lessons.  We do our journals and a foldable (if applicable) or a table or some graphic.  Then we do some practicing together.  After that, my students work independently for awhile, then work together to review their work and discuss mistakes.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we review the previous lesson and do a few more problems together, then the students continue to practice.  

As always, they do Calendar Math from Stephanie Moorman which gives them continued opportunities to practice place value, fractions, decimals, mean/median/mode, and operations.  Again, well worth the small investment.  The returns are priceless.