Week of September 18-20

This week, our 3rd graders began to explore how math is used in many different careers. We realized that when teachers are deciding how to arrange the desks in groups, they are using division! When travel agents are planning a vacation for someone, they have to use math to make a budget, book flights, hotels, and much more! Math is used in some way in almost every career. I encouraged the students to go home and ask an adult how he/she uses math at work. I can't wait to hear all about it next week!

In 4th grade, we kicked off our probability unit by discussing the likelihood of various events ocurring. This led to some great debates, especially when asked how likely it is that a meteorologist will correctly predict the weather or how likely it is that someone else at Menlo will have the same birthday as yours! We left off thinking about which comes up more often, heads or tails. Next week, we will use experimental probability to better answer this question.

The 5th graders learned a new way to indicate the order of operations in an expression - a diagram called a circle of evaluation. Circles of Evaluation show the structure that’s going on inside an expression. All Circles of Evaluation have two rules:
Circle Rule 1: Each circle must have one function, which goes at the top of the circle.
Circle Rule 2: The numbers are written below, in order from left to right.

This circle means: 351 / (4 - 5)
Next, we will learn how to convert that to code and begin programming!