Published January 30, 2012 | 
On January 27, two people who have helped me make science come alive in the classroom for many years returned for their annual visit. Tony Amandi and Leslie Lindsay, from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, brought all the materials needed to allow each student to dissect a fish. They also brought along two great helpers from their department, Sarah Bjork and Amelia Thornhill. Continue reading
Published January 24, 2012 | In order to meet the math facts speed goals for our Math Incentive Program, I’ve asked the students to spend 10 minutes on weekdays studying them. I’ve created a homework check sheet to reward students with room points who are working hard to meet their goals.
Student who reach their goal of passing their math facts, they can substitute reading or doing homework so that they can continue to earn room points for returning their slip.
Published January 8, 2012 | In a previous post I showed you how there are only 36 out of the 100 math facts that have to be memorized for multiplication, the rest are either easy (1 • n = n) or commutative (a • b = b • a). The same rules apply to the addition math facts as well.
Subtraction facts are a little trickier because the minuend (top number) goes from 0 to 19. This is because students often have to deal with problems that involve regrouping (borrowing) such as:
34
-15
Obviously, the 4 must become a 14 through regrouping. When taking this into account we end up with a table that looks like this:
At first glance 155, but it turns out that memorizing 72 of them is enough to get them all.
Notes:
n – 0 is easy (yellowish color).
n – 1 is easy, just count down 1 (blue-green color).
Pink numbers represent double digit numbers that don’t need regrouping (i.e. if you know 6 – 3 then 16 – 3 is a snap; but 16 – 7 requires dealing with both digits in the minuend).
The uncolored numbers total 72. A lot, but better than 155. I have designed three subtraction practice test you can download on the Math Facts page. Two of them are 40 problem tests: one deals with the minuends 3 through 10; the next 11 through 19. The other test has all the facts in white boxes shown in the table, plus 8 others, for a total of 80 problems. This way students can build up to the 80 problem quiz.
Published January 8, 2012 | Did you notice the new button at the top of the blog webpage? The Math Facts page is a new resource page that has been added to give information about the Turner Math Incentive program. You will find a kink to a pdf that you can use to download and print practice tests.
Published January 6, 2012 | The Dental Foundation of Oregon‘s Tooth Taxi is coming the week of February 6 through February 10 to treat school aged children (K-12). There is paper work that needs to be filled out, so it’s a good idea to fill out the permission slip as soon as you can and return it to the office. Here is the permission slip, which also contains other important information about the Tooth Taxi.