📖 In todays ESL lesson, Grade 5 began the story of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. As the title character has an enjoyment, and love, for anything but school, work, and getting up every morning, the students began by discussing activities they themselves love, like, and dislike; with many mirroring Tom Sawyer himself.

Each student made predictions of what would happen in Chapter 1, and each took turns reading; focusing on pronunciation and an understanding of the text to check their predictions, and critically think to answer several true or false questions about what they had read.

🎹 Ещё Пифагор говорил, что математика — это музыка небесных сфер. Ее можно не только увидеть, но и услышать!

Например, геометрическую прогрессию образует музыкальный строй фортепиано. Частота звучания каждой последующей клавиши будет в одно и тоже количество раз (корень двенадцатой степени из двух) больше предыдущей.

Когда мы видим и слышим, как математика «проявляется» на занятиях, учиться становится значительно интереснее.

🙇🏻‍♀️ The concept of division usually brings to mind images of sharing sweets among a group of friends. This is a simple enough way of giving context to expressions like
12 ÷ 3 = 4 (and let’s be honest, any excuse to get the sweets out is to be welcomed). The more hands-on children can get with mathematical objects, the better equipped they’ll be to make sense of all those symbols. But sharing is just one way to think about division.

When teaching division to children, it’s also helpful to have other representations at hand. In school, children are usually taught division in terms of sharing and grouping. They’ll be asked to ‘share an amount equally between’ or to ‘group an amount into equal sets’. This week the Year 1’s are focusing on sharing objects equally and are expected to group different objects together to help grasp the mathematical concept of division.