Day 31: Decimal Study Guide

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS.3 Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation.

The Learning Objective: Divide with decimal divisors and decimal dividends

Quote of the Day: “When your attempt rate is high, each individual failure becomes a lot less significant…Accepting failure doesn’t just make risk-taking easier. In a surprising number of instances, it’s the only reliable path to success.” – Ron Friedman

Question from Yesterday (as always from a student): "Why do we say 'slide' the decimal in division problems? Is it possible to get a quotient that is greater than 1 and less than 1?"

Assessment: Circumventing the classroom; checking the homework; hearing responses during pepper

Agenda:

1. Open Middle Monday - We changed this so that it was only finding the smallest possible sum.
2. Quote, Star Student, and Questions of the Day
3. Review of the word problems from the homework/pepper
4. Study Guide
5. Frayer Model of the 4 problems  (if time)

Glass-Half Full: I caught many students writing 0.9 to the quotient of 0.72 divided by 8 instead of 0.09. This error is easy to catch after the fact, but hard to catch the first time the problem is done. It's why it is so crucial that students have a strong foundation with how money works. I'm finding that students are having less and less of a foundation with money now than they were even eight years ago. Perhaps it is inflation that is causing the problem, but in any case it is creating bigger gaps in these students comprehension of decimals.

Regrets: The open middle problem was not answerable and in many cases a little too difficult because of the plus/minus signs and the issues surrounding adding and subtracting negative decimals. These are not technically in sixth grade standards so I don't like it to go into great depth because our plates are full as it is with the sixth grade curriculum.

Link of the Day: The video on assistments is less than three minutes long. I watched and thought it was a good advertisement, but haven't tried it yet. One of the teachers at my school swears by what it offers, so I'm going to give it a try.