Youngsters in grade four are now ten years old. They have past the nine-year-old shift in consciousness, but are still smoothing this out in their understanding of the world. Their new independence means a bit of separation from parents and teachers and some cantankerousness as this adjustment settles.

The City Garden School curriculum brings fractions in math class to help them understand how to break things into pieces and then put them back together to make a whole. 

This week fourth graders have been working to solidify and expand their understanding of long division. They are really rocking this operation!

At the beginning of the week, we learned a little rap to help the students remember to “divide, multiply, and subtract, bring it on down and bring it on back!” We are also learning a song and doing some exercises to demonstrate how multiplication and division are inverse operations.

Later in the week we took a dive into factoring and created a forest of factor trees in our main lesson books. These are fun precursors to some of the more complex operations that we will do with fractions in the next math block. The children can now identify prime and composite numbers and will move into prime factorization next.