Because I feel strongly that children, and adults for that matter, need to practice what they know in order to retain it each of your kids will have summer homework. A letter was sent home with your child on Tuesday outlining the expectations. This homework is due the first day of school, August 17. I am sharing the letter that was sent home with your children in this blog post. The links provided in the post are only ideas for practice, your child may choose any way they would like to practice as long as they log the date, activity, skill practiced and amount of time spent. If you need the passwords for the scholastic sites, please email me. They were provided to your children in the printed letter, but I did not include them in this post for obvious reasons.
In addition to the required reading and math I will be unlocking all essays on Utah Compose for your children to practice as well. I highly recommend your children practice their writing this summer. Writing in Utah Compose will give them instant feedback and allow them to revise their essays to improve their writing skills. We will be spending a lot of time writing next year and practicing this summer will give them a jump start for next school year.
Summer Homework
Summer is here and so are those long lazy days that seem to zap your brain of everything (or at least a lot) you worked so hard to learn this year. In order to avoid losing too much of that hard work, you will have summer homework. Now, don’t worry too much, it won’t take up your entire summer break. In fact, it will take about 20 minutes a day. What fraction of the time you are awake will this homework take? Let’s turn that into your first math problem of the summer.
Let’s say you sleep for about 12 hours a day this summer which gives you how much awake time? That’s right, 12 hours. How many minutes are there in 12 hours? A number sentence for the problem would be the number of minutes in each hour (60) multiplied by the number of hours (12). 12 x 60= ? That’s easy to do in our heads if we remember our magic zeros from the grey tower. 12×6=72 then we add a zero because we wanted to multiply by 60. The answer to the first part of our problem is 720 minutes in 12 hours.
But we aren’t done yet. Remember the question we are trying to answer. What fraction of the time you are awake will this homework take? Let’s turn the information into a fraction. 20 minutes of homework out of 720 minutes you are awake is a fraction of 20/720 (for you 5th and 6th level students let’s write that in simplest form by dividing your fraction by the highest common multiple, which happens to be 20= 1/36). That fraction converted to a percent (I’ve done it for you since you will learn that skill next year) is 2.7% That’s less than a nickel of your time if you think of it in terms of money, heck that’s less than 3 pennies of your time.
See how we turned the amount of time it would take for you to do your homework into a fantastic word problem? FUN!!
Summer Homework Assignment Due the First Day of School, August 17th.
10 Hours of Math Practice – IXL, Workbooks, Cooking, Gardening, Lemonade Stand are a few ways you can practice your math skills.
Dynamath – http://dynamath.scholastic.com/
Scholastic Math – http://math.scholastic.com/
IXL – https://www.ixl.com/signin/mariamontessori
2 Book Reports – Read to books of your choice with a minimum of 100 pages at your reading level. Complete a summary of each book complete with book title, author and number of pages.
As always, if you have any questions please let me know.