Welcome back! I have a straight Grade 5 class this year with 22 students! I love the numbers. I hope they last.

Today we started working with SOLE, Self Organized Learning Environments for the first time this year. We had many technical difficulties, iPods not connecting, laptops out of commission and therefore had to set it aside until tomorrow. Now that WIFI is in the portable and the cable into the room has been strung up we are ready to roll.

We have also been experimenting with rudimentary SOLE in math. Students get into groups of 4, solve a math problem, record the steps they used to solve it and report to the class. Below are a couple of examples that came about today.

A large box contains 18 small boxes and each small box contains 25 chocolate bars. How many chocolate bars are in the large box?

By Zach, Hunter, Caden and Keeshan.

18 small boxes. Each box has 25 bars so we need to multiply 18 and 25. A large box has 450 chocolate bars.

Abi, Andrew, Dora, Stewart

Large box = 18 small boxes
Small box = 25 chocolate bars

The answer is 450 chocolate bars. We know this because we made a number line and counted by 25's.

Cameron, Katelynne, Cody, Denyce

A large box contains 18 small boxes.
Each small box contains 25 chocolate bars.

What we did was multiply 25 X 18. We got an answer of 450.

Here is a math wiki that looked really good.

http://rbslearninghubmaths.wikispaces.com/home