Wednesday, October 5th: Splitting Up Land Sections and Vital Signs

Last night's homework, in which the students separated gardens into different sized plots, prepared them for today's challenging problem: Land Sections. This problem comes from our Connected Mathematics Textbook: Bits & Pieces II, page 18. The problem asks students to determine what part of a whole section of land belongs to certain farmers. While all the reasoning is spatial at first, the students must then add plots of land together, forcing them to add fractional parts of different sizes. As we move into adding with unlike denomitators, these types of problems connect it to common sense and allow students to problem solve with the same ideas regardless of their arithmetic skills. Their homework tonight is to finish assigning fractions to each farmer's plot, then answering questions B-F, found in their workbook on pages 18 and 19.

In science, students used their photographs from yesterday's field work to create written observations that will help them identify the invasive species they found along the trail on school grounds. There are 12 different invasives in this section of forest, and the students will be posting their findings on a Gulf of Maine Research Institute website called Vital Signs. More on that in the coming weeks - check for pictures to be posted by the end of the week!