Day 6: Repeating Decimals (Again)

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 of the Day (As always from a student): Typically when the word combine is used, it means to add. Why is it that with 6b - b it is still considered "combining" like terms?

Regular Math Objective: Locate repeating decimals on a number line

Regular Math Sequence:

1. Number Talk 65 - 28. Again today students were using the standard algorithm, but there were other strategies that were shared that I found encouraging. Some students would add three to 65 and then take off three from their solution (65 + 3) - 28 = 40 - 3 = 37. Other students were taking away the tens digits (60 - 20) = 40 and then subtracting the ones digits (5 - 8) = -3 and then combining those together
2. QSSQ
3. Review the homework and pepper
4. Review the exit ticket
5. Students began to work on the fraction to decimal practice.
6. Exit ticket that mirrored the previous day's exit ticket. 
7. Pass out the homework

Regrets: Students had struggled the previous day, so I wanted to see what type of growth both the written and oral feedback had on students. There was some growth. Students that did not put the fraction into a decimal the day before were generally doing that in the exit ticket this time around. The problem was that these same students were now having difficulty locating the point on the number line because they had not even approached that the day before. For students that struggled with the number line, there was some improvement but still some flaws. 

All that said, this topic is mighty boring if you're not into the whole math thing, so I'm moving on. Students will get the exit tickets back with feedback in the next class. We will also try to fit this into a 2-4-2 homework in the future and of course include it on the study guide before the quiz. By then hopefully students have a grasp on what they need to do. 

Glass Half-Full: Pepper is helping students wrap their heads around what a rational number is versus what it is not. Students were thinking that repeating decimals are not rational, but as their exit tickets have been indicating all rational numbers can be placed on the number line. 

Honors Math Objective: Analyze the differences in how to find decimal equivalent for repeating decimals of one, two and three digits

Honors Math Sequence:

1. Number Talks
2. QSSQ
3. Homework Review
4. What happens to the decimal when we multiply by 100? By 10? This conversation led us to determining how to get rid of the repeating part of the decimal when the sequence is two digits long, three digits long, etc.
5. Students were given marker boards and I assessed them individually to see if they could find fraction equivalents to a few different decimals
6. Homework was a pre-cursor to square roots. 

Glass Half-Full: I was half-expecting that I would have to stand and deliver the lesson for students. By giving the students wait time and getting them to collaborate with their groups as I asked the question in step four I was encouraged by the diversity of answers that I heard. Some students said to multiply the decimal by 10,000 and then subtract by multiplying it by 100. Others said to multiply by 100 and take away 1. I even heard 1000x minus 10x. All of the answers were correct and it led to a much better conversation around the day's objective.