Can You Count to a Googol?

Unit 5 in Everyday Math teaches students about place value and numeration. Today in class, I shared the book "Can You Count To A Googol?" by Robert E. Wells. The students were fascinated with it and the book got them inquiring about other numbers and just what it means to be a HUGE, TREMENDOUS, BIG number.

As we were reading, I posted "What if...?" questions and the students loved it. For example, I asked questions such as "What if you saw 10,498 lions while on safari?" or "What if you ate 9,207 kernels of popcorn?"

After the book, the kids got to create their own "What if...?" sentences with large numbers. Check out their questions!

What if...

… you had 1,000 boxes of ice creams? Jescah

… you ate 9,846 cookies? Adrienne

… you had one million dogs? Vansh

…a there was 607,896 air in the world? Tanay

…there were 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000… students in the school? Christophe

… there were 900,000 fruit flies in the class? Travis

… there was a googol children in a 4X4 meter room? Luka

… 77,777 spiders were born in one egg? Zoey

… you had 88,888 million bunnies? Noelle

… 9,000 people made trucks? Elrad

… you had googol pets? Evan

… 9,640 of your friends each had 7,000 kids? Magali

… everyone had an octillion chocolates? Stan

… you had 10,000400 dog? Tristan

… you have 99,999 toys? Elin

… there was 7,504 hats on each person? Maiya

… you had 100,000,000 pets? Alma

… you had 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars? Ethan

… you wore 1,000 t-shirts? Meet

Check out the book with your class and post your own "What if..." questions below?

Writing Focus: Expository Paragraphs

This past week, to correspond with the introduction of our new unit about water, the students began learning about expository writing. This type of writing provides answers to questions about the world. The main purpose of expository writing is to explain and inform the reader.

The most important of the 6 writing traits to teach during this genre are ideas and word choice. I wanted to share some activities you could do at home to practice these traits. Here are three ideas from our Write Source curriculum to help your child start thinking about expository text:

• Invite each family member to show and explain a skill or trick that requires at least three steps. Use the terms such as first, next, and then to help organize the concepts being explained.
• While waiting in line or traveling in a car call out a general noun such as pet, insect, sport, food, movie, book or plant. Ask your child to name specific nouns that fit into that category. Then switch roles. I still play this on road trips as an adult. We call the game “categories”  and you can get really creative with the topics you choose.
• At meal time, ask each family member to name two objects that are important to them and explain why they are important. Have the family vote on the item that would make a more interesting writing topic.

Enjoy!
Ms. Rorey

Multiplication Practice

The students keep chugging along and are learning more and more each day. They have been working hard on their multiplication facts. Earlier in the week, we used some shells and slips of paper to model the concept of multiplication being a set number of groups with a set number of items in each group.