This morning we discussed positive and negative impacts that humans have on ecosystems. We linked this to our prior unit on food webs and the impact that removing or altering certain species can have on a food chain or food web. One of the examples that we discussed was the key role that grazing animals have in grassland habitats.
Arianna and I began with the daily spiral review consisting of probability, comparing place value, ordering 4-digit numbers, estimating, and determining the operation needed to solve word problems. Then, we worked in her fraction packet on writing fractions of shaded and not shaded shapes, reading fractions in word form and then writing the fractions, and circling fractions with common denominators. We finished on Mathseeds with adding fractions, decomposing fractions, and matching mixed numbers to their fraction pictures.
Arianna completed “The Adventures of Charles Pierce; The Last Egret” by Harvey Oyer III and discussed the actions of the characters. She compared how the characters felt about killing the egrets at the beginning of the story and how they felt at the end.
It was a Harry Potter kind of day. After coming to an agreement that after this book we will leave Harry for a new genre, we started reading ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. We expected the first chapter to be mostly a recap of important events in the first two stories, and we found that the recap actually bridged chapters one and two. We did meet a new Dursley family member who lives up to their history of treating Harry badly, in fact she is a bit worse! However, it looks as though Harry is about ready to stand up for himself against his Muggle relatives, an event that Arianna feels is long overdue.
This morning we began the unit review on the topics of food webs and roles of different species. Arianna completed multiple learning activities including an interactive study game and vocabulary quiz.
This morning, Arianna worked in her fraction packet. She used multiplication or division to find equivalent fractions, wrote fractions to match descriptions, found fractions that were equal to one whole, and shaded figures to show the indicated fractions. Then, she spent time on Mathseeds adding fractions with like denominators and solving fraction word problems. We finished with questions from the unit test on changing mixed numbers into improper fractions, estimating fractions, and equivalent fractions.
