Monday, September 8th: Kangaroo Math and Observations/Inferences

Today the students reviewed the words "Grit", "strategies", and "resource" to remind them of the problem solving lessons we did last week. I then laid out my philosophy as a math teacher: that 75% of being a good math student is being a good problem solver, and 25% is having the skills and the background needed to access harder problems. Today, we started taking three diagnostic tests to find a starting point for their math skills. Their math homework is a set of problems to struggle with. They should work on these for 30 minutes of good struggling before moving on from the assignment.

Science homework is the Observation/Inference handout they began in class today. We have been practicing making observations and then forming inferences from these. We started with observations around the classroom, classifying these as Qualitative or Quantitative, and soon we will move to boserving and making inferences about crime scenes...