Math This Week - September 6 - 9, 2011

Last week we spent several days looking through our Student Reference Book. It's a very important resource that I want the students to use throughout this year. We also started looking at rectangular arrays. Arrays are a great way to show multiplication, factors and products. This week we are continuing our unit on factors. On Tuesday, we connected arrays to factors and products. We used these arrays to find factor pairs and all of the factors of a number. Factor rainbows are a great method of finding all the factors of a number. Look for definitions and examples in their Math spiral. We will continue working with factors as we play the "Factor Captor Game." This can be found on page 271 in their Student Reference Book and can be played at home. I will provide game boards to students who would like to play this game with you at home. Look definitions and examples of even number, odd number, and remainder in their Math spiral. We will finish the week by looking at divisibility. The students will learn methods to find which numbers are divisible by another number. These can be found on page 13 in their Math Journal. This is a great lesson to improve their multiplication and division recall. Multiplication recall is a skill that we will be focusing on for the next few weeks. It's increasingly important that they are able to quickly recall multiplication facts. It will help them in many facets of multiplication. We are currently taking multiplication practice tests to see where each students needs improvement.