Thursday December 12

Our Thinking Thursday problems were solving for an unknown value in an equation with both sides of the balance having two addends. Most students are successful with solving these kinds of questions now and they are "becoming easier". After this work we began mixing our ingredients to make our cookie batter. This process took most of the morning. Mixing the butter and sugar was the toughest part because the butter was a little hard. Once it warmed up and got squished it became easier to mix. Before lunch each table group created their cookie balls and added their thumbprints to make heart shapes.

 After lunch the students listened to 6 minutes and then worked on figuring out how much each batch of cookies cost. The groups were given the cost of either a 1/4 cup or 1/2 cup of ingredient then had to do some calculations to find out how much the recipe cost. In some cases the ingredient amount given with a cost was not the exact amount the recipe called for. For example, a 1/4 cup of cost 3 cents, but the amount used in a batch was 1 3/4 cups. This was an introduction to fractions and even decimals when finding out the total cost. The trickiest cost to figure out was the jam. One cup of jam cost $5 and the recipe only used 1/3 cup. Guess and test  was a valid strategy here as well as division if students felt comfortable with it...and understood. We found the cost of a batch of cookies was $3.82 and for the entire class of 6 batches....well multiply that by 6. 

 To see the recipe, view Wednesdays blog.

 At the end of the day we began to make cards to go along with the cookies. These didn't get finished so time will be given tomorrow so the cookies can be delivered on Saturday.

Reminders:
- food drive is on until mid next week
- clothing drive is on until end of next week.
- Thursday next week is early dismissal

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