Greetings and welcome to this week's edition of Math Magicians! As you can see, it's been a busy and creative week! A big thank you to Mrs. O'Donnell, who, with the help of some of our wonderful mathematicians, used manipulatives to illustrate our lesson for this week: tree diagrams. Tree diagrams are a way to show all of the outcomes that can happen whenever an event happens. This is helpful because as most of you know, knowing all of the options available to you or that could happen when you begin a project can help you in the planning of that project. So tree diagrams are important!
We also learned this week that there is a faster way to determine the number of outcomes for a given event: it's called the Fundamental Counting Principle (FCP). The FCP is basically a multiplication problem where you multiply all the ways one thing can happen with all of the ways anything else you are considering to get all the ways that both of them can happen together. Needless to say, the kids like doing FCP problems better than making tree diagrams, but both activities were fun this week!
Now, as many of you may know, Mr. Armstrong LOVES to bring technology into the classroom whenever possible. This is the second year I've been blessed to have the use of my SmartBoard in the room, and this year, I've been given the opportunity to improve its capabilities even more! This week, for the first time in my classroom, the students took the first quiz of the year using the remote response clickers! I know that there are several schools around where this has been happening for some time, but it's the first time for ME in MY classroom, so I was completely geeked out about it! This method is GREAT, for several reasons: one, the students get instant feedback as to how they did on the quiz; they don't have to wait for me to grade papers and get the papers back to me; two, I could export the scores from the quiz to an Excel spreadsheet, so that instead of going through that stack of papers to input my grades, I just have one sheet of paper with everyone's grades on it! Thirdly, the children just loved this alternate form of assessment that got them away from the traditional pencil-and-paper form of test taking (at least for a minute anyway...) So, for the forseeable future, we will be taking our weekly quizzes on Friday using the SmartBoard and the clickers!
Next week, we will start the week with our annual MAP testing, which are our practice tests and assessments in preparation for the CRCT administration next spring! So everyone get plenty of rest and be ready to go on Monday, because that's when we are going to be taking the test! After that, we will spend another week making sure that we know how (and especially WHEN) to make tree diagrams and/or solve problems using the FCP. We will also get more into the study of the probability of compound events (when more than one thing is happening). Until that time, see ya in the Red Hallway, Knights! 801, SECOND TO NONE!!!
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