Compare and Contrast with vocabulary words

Finally a blog post about reading!  This past week we read a portion of a story called, Riding Freedom.  My school uses Houghton Mifflin Journeys and the stories are incredible.  Each week we ask the students questions where they have to refer to the text to find or infer the answers.  The question was about vocabulary:    Based on paragraph 2 and 3 which word is similar to the word route?  Two of the choices were road and highway.  All the students chose the word road but I was curious to see if they could tell me the difference between the two words.  So we created a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two words, compare and contrast was our skill for the week.  I would love to use this strategy with vocabulary words, I will need to create a list of words that I could use for this activity.  I was amazed at what they were able to come up with to compare the two words.

Here is our completed Venn diagram.  Let me know what you think.

Modeling Mixed Numbers

We have been working diligently on our fraction unit despite all the recent snow days we have experienced!  One recent lesson was adding two fractions with the result an improper fraction.  We needed to change our improper fractions into a mixed number.  My students really struggled with this lesson and I needed to find a way to help them visualize how the two fractions would form a mixed number.

After some thought I decided to create a worksheet with pictures that were rectangular arrays.  My colleague  suggested that the students color each portion of the fraction with a different color to help them visualize how the mixed number is made.

Here is a picture of the original sheet I created.  At the time it was quicker to hand write the sheet than to use the computer and make it look good.

Students were much more successful with the assignment once they could visualize how the mixed number was created by the two different colors on their worksheet.  I was very happy to see how well they did on the assignment.  The addition of color helped them to cement the concept of the mixed numbers.

Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday afternoon.