Monday, October 27th: Design "Cover-Up 2.0"

Today in Math, students made the pieces for and played a game called "Cover-Up" to help make solid connections to the concept of equivalent tractions. The pieces they played with took up 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 of their desk, and the students rolled specially made dice to see which piece they would be able to use as they raced to cover the entire desk. Tonight, their homework is to design a new version of this game, changing one or more of the following elements: the shape of the gameboard, the shape of the pieces, or the size of the fractional pieces used. Students can either make the board and its pieces, or they can come in with a detailed plan for the new version including sketches, the number of pieces needed, and the fractional parts used.

In science, the students created working definitions of producers, consumers, and decomposers. Afte a brief pre-assessment to see what the students knew about the terms, we built a collection of examples of each, and used the similarities and differences between those collections. This week, students will be doing an inventory of the producers and consumers in local habitats, and using fractions to better understand the food pyramid in various ecosystems.