It's a busy and festive time at the holidays and the last thing you want to do is tire yourself out so that you don't enjoy the festivities ahead. Yet, that's not easy to do when you add holiday events to an already busy schedule.
That's why you have to prioritize what's most important at this time of year while meeting the typical expectations too.
Today we'll conclude the last big day of explicit teaching related to the division unit--there was a lot to review and teach explicitly during this unit including the area model, problem solving strategies, the associative property, distributive property, commutative property, identity property, partial product multiplication algorithm, traditional multiplication algorithm, mathematical language, and multiplying with decimals. So today we'll walk through that final explicit lesson about multiplying with decimals using a variety of strategies including traditional multiplication, the area model, the distributive model and considering what happens when we multiply decimals by powers of 10. Tomorrow thru Wednesday and Thursday for some will be time for practice and review, then students will take the unit test. It's a bit rushed, but I know that most students will master the concepts, and then we'll revisit these concepts again in January as we study division language, algorithms, and problem solving.
We'll continue our efforts w/reading, science investigations, and SEL while also partaking in a number of special grade-level and school events too. The focus for me is mainly to keep a good, patient, and caring rhythm going amongst all this activity. For some at some times the pace is too great right now. This is when I wish class sizes were smaller and the expectations less--I wish there was less of a push to move through so much content in so little time. Yet I see how well our students do overall and how staying the course serves to build a strong foundation for later learning. It's always a balancing act--one I strive to choose well with as much as possible. Onward.
