Fourth Grade Math Lately

A Typical Week

Mondays and Wednesdays are ‘instructional days’ where students learn and explore new content based on our Pearson Curriculum. They practice in partnerships on the new content and independently gain confidence in their skills. This is also the day they receive homework, which is turned in on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Students are familiar with their extra large Pearson workbooks.

This clip system is we keep track of homework submissions. 

Tuesdays and Thursdays are ‘workshop days’ where students work in partnerships and table groups to explore the prior’s day new content. This could look like rotating centers with hands on manipulatives or exploring online tools to support their learning.

Fridays are ‘Fun Fridays’ where students rotate in ‘colored teams’ to practice math fluency, word problems, test prep, and to play Prodigy.

New Unit: Fractions and Decimals

The fourth graders bravely started studying fractions and decimals last week. This week, students have been creating fraction cards, which show fractions numerically and with a picture. These fraction cards are math tools to help us distinguish between “proper” and “improper” fractions.

You can practice fractions at home, too! Below are some at-home ideas from Pearson’s Investigations in Number, Data and Space® curriculum:

Fair Shares

You can build on the work of this unit at home by capitalizing on everyday situations that involve fractions. Issues of fairness often offer good examples. Here are some examples of ways to apply fraction concepts at home:

• Dividing a pan of brownies evenly (“What is 1/3 of 18 brownies?” “What if we want to divide this pan evenly among six people?”)
• Sharing a pizza (“1/3 of the pizza has mushrooms, 1/3 has pepperoni, 1/3 has onions, so what might the pizza look like?”)
• Doubling a recipe or halving a recipe (“The recipe calls for a half a cup but we need to double it, so how much do we need?”)

If you get the opportunity to apply fraction concepts at home, please share those moments with us! We love it when students understand the relevance of what we are learning together!