Wednesday, February 4th: Dividing Fractions with Whole Numbers - Word Problems and pg. 55-57 #1-10

Students have been working hard to understand and build skills around dividing fractions. We started by dividing whole numbers by fractional parts, then dividing fractions by whole numbers. It's difficult to hold back from teaching the old 'flip-and-multiply' technique, but I'm holding out a bit longer. That method may be the poster child for "Things We Do In Math That Make No Sense But Seem To Work." Whenever possible, I'd like strategies to make sense for students, and so we've been plugging away at solving these problems through reason and fraction sense, using drawings instead of memorized steps. It's hard, and they're doing well. Tomorrow we'll look at some of the shortcuts. There homework tonight is to finish a set of word problems designed to give them more practice and more challenge, and then move on to a problem set in their math books - pg 55-57, #1-10.

In science, students are finishing up a close look at a special lake in California called Mono Lake. Mono Lake is saltier than the ocean, and has a very limited food web because of that. The students have been telling the story of Mono Lake and iillustrating it along the way.