Wednesday, December 8

 Hi parents,

We had another good day today. In the morning, we upped the difficulty level for morning math, and I was really happy with the results. Morning Math has been a bit repetitive the last few days, and although repetitive practice can be awesome with math, I think the students were ready for something fresh. So, we started doing some input / output problems.

Basically, students are given a series of numbers, in this format (but more aesthetically pleasing):

6 ------- > 18

5 ---------> 15

3 -------->  9

Then they have to determine the 'rule' that can be applied to each 'input' number in order to get the corresponding 'output'. In the example above, the rule is "multiply by 3". These problems are great because they have such a high ceiling. A teacher could hypothetically make a rule as complicated as "subtract 2, multiply by 4, subtract 1" and take the rest of the day off while the students struggle for hours.

We practiced spelling and the students quizzed each other on this week's words. It went much better than practices in previous weeks and I'm quite optimistic for this week's quiz.

The students worked on Christmas themed math worksheets, and went outside for gym with Ms. Brown.

In the afternoon, we had Daily LA, Work Period, and Music.

Have a nice night,

Zac