Nine Times Table Strategies & Lever Experiments

     Hope everyone had an enjoyable Family Day on Monday!  We are looking forward to our field trip to the “Be Brave” Hitmen game next Tuesday.  There are also daily activities happening next week for anti-bullying week—read all about them on the grade 4 home page.  Students also wrote their monthly letter of their learning in February, which went home today.
     In math this week, we celebrated the 100th day of school on Tuesday with students working on some “100” challenges in class.  Some problems we tackled were: 
      -Show how to make $100 10 different ways
    -Add up the numbers from 1 to 100. You can work with a partner and use a calculator. But first, estimate how much you think the answer will be: ______What is the actual answer?
    -Each letter of the alphabet has a point value. A=1, B=2, C=3 etc. Can you write words that equal 100 points?  How close can you get?
     4A & 4C did an excellent job on these challenges!  Students also continued to work on building their personal strategies when working with multiplication, and practicing using these strategies to recall their basic facts.  We looked at the patterns in the nine times table and learned a few strategies to recall them more easily.   One strategy we looked at was that for every 9’s fact, adding the first number and the last number of the product always equals 9.
Example:  9 x 6
Step 1:  Subtract 1 from the number you are multiplying by 9.
             Subtracting 1 from 6 equals 5.
           6 – 1 = 5    The first number in the product is 5.
Step 2: Adding the first and last numbers in the product will always equal 9.
        Add 5 plus 4 to equal 9.  5 + 4 = 9 The last number in the product is 4.
Step 3:  9 x 6 = 54
     We also learned a neat finger trick you can use for your nine facts (see below).  ​Hopefully these strategies will assist students in recalling their nine times table facts more easily in their “Mad Minute” questions.  We also played a few rounds of  “Multiplication Bingo!” which was a lot of fun.

     In science, we continued to study levers and where we can find examples of them out in the world.  We made first-class levers with rulers, erasers & weights in class, and realized that if a load is heavier, we need to move the fulcrum closer to the heavier end to make the ruler balance.  Students also made a simple lever using an eraser and pencil to lift a heavy book.  Students discovered that if the fulcrum was closer to the book, it was easier to lift but you had to push down on the pencil further.  As opposed to if the fulcrum was further away from the book—you pushed down with less distance but it was much harder to lift.  Students documented their findings and observations in their visual journals through writing and labeled diagrams.
Enjoy the final weekend of February!
—Ms. Jagger