Arrays and Factors and Quotients...oh my!

We've been cruising right along with our first math unit...from multiplication right on into division.  On Monday morning I gave them the real-world scenario that my friend, Mrs. Gilooly, bought a package of 18 markers and wanted to share them with me.  She was going to split her 18 markers into 2 equal groups.  We needed to figure out how many markers Mrs. Gilooly and I were each going to get.  The students used counters to represent the markers and the fair-share strategy ("One for Mrs. Gilooly, One for Mrs. Curran, etc") to solve the problem.  They easily determined that Mrs. Gilooly and I would each get 9 markers by counting the number of counters they had placed in each group.  It was so easy, the children were shocked when I told them that they had just done division!

Moving on from there, we've been examining fact families- multiplication and division problems that use the same numbers- and determining which numbers represent the whole, the number of groups, or the size of the groups.  We also learned that the term factor means numbers being multiplied together to get a product, and a quotient is the answer to a division problem.

As we continue on with this unit next week we will learn about the commutative property by examining arrays vertically and horizontally to see that, for example, 3 rows of 5 or 5 rows of 3 gives us the same answer!

In Science we have started our hands-on Rocks and Minerals unit.  The students used hand lenses to examine three different types of rocks and recorded their observations.  As they shared their observations we discovered that each group had a rock that had imprints of seashells in it as well as a rock that had little pieces of smaller pebbles stuck to it.  One group had a rock shaped like Mount Everest, another had one shaped like a heart, and another had one shaped like a stadium!   The students looked through some books on rocks to try to see if they could find any rocks that looked similar to the ones they were examining, but I think we were left with more questions than answers.  I enjoyed seeing their curiosity as they examined the rocks and talked with classmates about their observations.

Next week in Social Studies we will be heading "Down Under" and start learning about Australia.  Be sure to ask your child about how life in Australia is the same and different from our lives here in the United States!