10-9-08 Update!

Hello Parents and Students,

Thank you for visiting today. We had a fabulous week of learning in our classroom. Our expectations here at Ford are that the children really own their knowledge by having the ability to APPLY the skills that they have learned in a variety of situations. Our math benchmark assessment reiterated this very clearly. Your child must be able to take the skills that we have learned in math, retain the knowledge, and apply it when needed to solve a variety of problems. The CRCT that we will take in the springtime is filled with application-type problems that evaluate your child's ability to do just that. See the extra credit below for an example of the type of word problem your child is expected to be able to solve.

Another important concept that we learned this week is editing our writing to check for complete sentences. An activity that will help your child self-monitor this is called the "meatball method". After writing a story, have your child start at the end of the story. At each ending punctuation mark, draw a "meatball" or a circle right next to the period. Working backwards through the story, do this for each sentence. When this is done, again working from the end of the story, have your child place his fingers on a set of "meatballs". Read the sentence in isolation, determining whether or not it is a complete sentence. This is an excellent editing exercise!

Dinner Conversation Starters...
*Ask your child why we are studying the Creek Nation
*Ask your child to explain why the Creek people had to live near rivers
*ask your child to explain the rule for regrouping in double digit addition problems
*ask your child how the book Sideways Stories from Wayside School ended

Extra Credit Question: Due on or before Wednesday, Oct. 15th...CLEARLY work out the problem and then carefully write your answer in sentence form!!!
Professor Pattern knew something was wrong. The numbers he found scattered on the carpet were 12, 6, 15,9, 18,3, 21, 4, and 24, but they were supposed to form a pattern. They were not in any order he could see and it appeared that one number did not belong with the group. What is the proper order and which number does not belong?