Class Summary
- This week in class we learned about The Order of Operations. I taught a new mnemonic that will hopefully help the students remember the left to right nature of the multiplication/division and addition/subtraction steps.
- The Order of Operations:
- Grouping symbols – Complete the order of operations on everything inside the grouping symbols.
- Exponents
- Multiplicative operations (multiply/divide) – left to right – This means you may have to divide before multiplying based on what comes first left to right.
- Additive operations (add/subtract) – left to right– This means you may have to subtract before adding based on what comes first left to right.
- If you have any questions on why I chose to do it this way, I am happy to explain in more detail but here is a quick answer. I found the idea from this blog post: Why I will never use PEMDAS to teach order of operations – Leaf and STEM Learning. I was skeptical, but after seeing some arguments on social media over the order of operations, I realized that maybe GEMA will work better than PEMDAS and decided to try it in class.
- We did a puzzle activity that was challenging, and the students worked hard and did great! They have a worksheet that has some order of operation problems, they are the same ones we used for the activity in class. If they want to complete it and see the answers, I will post it on our class Slack channel. Due to the use license, I cannot post this resource to the blog.
Homework for this Week:
- Print the Accountability Sheet and return it to class next week.
- Work on your curriculum goal.
- Play a game we have played in class with a member of your family or a friend. We didn’t have any new games this week. You may:
- Play a game we have already played in class.
- Play another game with your family. Most games involve math is some way. Strategy and critical thinking are an important part of math, so those are awesome skills we can practice when playing games.
- Here is our presentation sign up. We have had awesome presentations so far!! I am so excited to see what the rest of you will share with the class! Here is the additional presentation information if you need to refer back to it. If you have any questions about your presentation, please let me know.