Fun with Idioms!

We had fun with idioms during our Little Red Dot activity!

The meaning of an idiom cannot be taken literally - it is a figurative of speech. In class, we watched a funny video on idioms when we take it literally. You can watch the video here again:

We also explored more interesting idioms in groups and created creative idiom cards. They are now displayed on the class noticeboard. Here are some pictures taken during group work:

Rounding

When working on the topic of Rounding, I noticed that the pupils were not using the correct mathematical language so I have to repeatedly model the correct Mathematics language in the classroom.

We no longer use the term "round down". But instead we say "Round to" and "Round Up".

A teacher in our school, Mrs Tong,  shared the following resource with the level teachers. Although it may look simple, we found that the colour coding of the numbers really helped the pupils work out if they need to round to /round up the numbers.

A common error that the pupils is facing difficulty in is to decide what numbers they are to put at the beginning and ends of their number lines.

To make the thinking more visible, I taught them is to say to themselves ...... :

1) When I am asked to round to the nearest 10 , I need to COUNT in tens to put down the two numbers at the ends of the number line.

2) When I am asked to round to the nearest 100, I count in hundreds 

3) When I am asked to round to the nearest 1 000, I count in thousands     

   

More Than / Less Than

For this lesson, pupils work in groups of 4 or 5. As this is the first group work in the year, I went through the group rules with them again following the acronym "GROUPS".

For this activity, they  took turns to pick numeral cards from a deck to form a 5 digit number. The group then need to work out what is 1 more, 10 more, 1000 more and 10 000 more than that number.

They repeat the same for 1 less, 10 less , 100 less and 1000 less.

Here are some pictures of them working collaboratively in groups. As they got excited, they were reminded to use their 15 cm voices instead of their "soccer field" voices.

Awarding groups that display strong teamwork following the GROUP rules with Class Dojo points proved to be an effective tool to ensure that the groups stay on task. I am glad that the class responded well to the Class Dojo points system.