Monday 2/5/2024

Today I was sick/at the doctor.

Tuesday 2/6/2024

Yesterday the students learned about fractions and they made connections to division and to
cutting shapes into equal parts. To begin our lesson, we talked about what we now know about fractions
and how we can show it. Then, we learned about factors, common factors, and greatest common
factors. It is so important that we hammer in this skill today and tomorrow because on Thursday, we are
learning about least common multiple and these two terms are very commonly confused with each
other. I’m not sure how I feel about both of these terms being on the same unit test. On one side, I wish
they could just focus on one at a time without confusing the two with each other, and on the other side,
I think it is probably a good thing that we are telling them that they are confusing to a lot of people and
giving them opportunity to differentiate between the two themselves. The students have also never
heard of prime numbers (not until sixth grade) which I personally think makes finding factors much more
difficult since they cannot use a factor tree and prime factorization.

Wednesday 2/7/2024

Today we took the two skills they learned so far this week and put them together today to learn
about simplifying fractions into their simplest form. I gave the students the option of how to do this
since they are pretty familiar with simplifying fractions already. They can either guess and check which
numbers to divide the numerator and denominator or they can find the GCF of the numerator and
denominator and then divide both by the number they get. Either way, they get the same answer, so
this just allows the students who have already “clicked” this concept in their heads to move on faster.
Once the students had finished their homework, and a lot of them did finish during work time, I had
printed a color by number. They would find the color each number is by simplifying the fraction. I quickly
learned that fifth graders LOVE anything that gives them an excuse to color! Conferences went well after
school. We got done around 7:15pm. I met a lot of parents and got a lot of grading done as well since
they were student lead conferences and I wasn’t needed all the time.

Thursday 2/8/2024

Today was arguably the most difficult lesson I have taught so far. We learned about least
common multiples. The students had such a hard time differentiating between gcf and lcm. Right off the
bat, they had some AMAZING discussion questions that THEY prompted. They asked questions like, why
we don’t find the greatest common multiple or the least common factor, which really helped them
understand WHY we find what we do. I think the “why” is what is really going to help these students
because when mixing these two concepts, they are just too similar. The district has also asked us to stray
away from tricks to help the students come up with answers, so giving the students the “why” was the
only other option I could think of. I am so so glad that they clearly wanted to know why and I didn’t have
to push it onto many students that blatantly don’t care.

Friday 2/9/2024

YAY FRIDAY!! Today was a review day! The test is on Monday, so today we focused on getting
missing assignments turned in, completing the color by numbers worksheet (not graded) and also a
GCF/LCM Mystery Graph that I found on TPT. This graph had them find gcf and lcm to make an ordered
pair that they could plot on a coordinate plane which would them become a connect the dots into a
mystery picture! If the students finished these or didn’t want to do either of them, they had a few IXL
choices to choose from. I got a LOT of grading done today, especially as they were turning so much late
homework in. We also chose our recording dates for EdTPA.