Unit 4

Happy New Year everyone!  We've settled back into our routine here at school and have begun Unit 4.  It breaks down like this:

Review Skills

• Coordinate graphing (like playing the game Battleship)
• Divisibility - This was introduced in Unit 1 and students have a list of divisibility rules in their math folder.  They may refer to it as needed.  This skill will be helpful and important when we study fractions.

Computational Skills

• Long division with remainders
• Mental math strategies using multiplication and division

New Material

• Division word problems where students must interpret the remainders 
• Algebraic word problems
• The commutative property of addition (a + b = b + a) and multiplication (a x b = b x a)

Here is a sample of a problem where students must interpret the remainder:

There are 123 guests attending a wedding.  They will be seated 10 to a table.  How many tables are needed?
Solution: 123/10 = 12 r 3    There will be 12 full tables and 3 people without a seat.  13 tables will be needed.


A basic algebraic problem looks something like this:

Kevin has 10 marbles in his collection.  He wins some more marbles during a game at recess.  When he goes home that afternoon, he gives 5 of his marbles to his younger brother.  Write an expression to show how many marbles Kevin has now.
Solution:  (10 + m) -5

The trickiest thing for students to understand is that the algebraic expression is their answer.  The word problem doesn't provide enough information to lead them to a final numerical answer.  As we progress through this unit, sometimes students will be given a value for the variable such as If m=7, how many marbles does Kevin have now?

We will practice this extensively in class and eventually, students will be ready to tackle more complex word problems.  They will also think this through in reverse by taking an algebraic expression and writing a word problem that fits it.

As always, if students find this material difficult and so are unable to complete homework, we trust that they will do their best to find something there (no matter how small) that they can attempt.  Each day, we will go over the previous night's homework aloud and answer questions.  Students may then complete the work as we are discussing it, or ask to see something they struggled with done on the board.  Our cooperative groups earn bonus points when someone is brave enough to raise their hand and ask a question or ask for help understanding something in class.