October 2009

News/Events

October 3 (11:00am – 4:00pm) – Scholastic Chess Tournament.  Chess builds each student’s confidence, learning that problem solving and thinking can be FUN.  Signup today to save $2.

October 17 (1:00pm – 11:00pm) – Christmas Card CropFest.  Get your cards done early, impress your friends, and trim away some holiday stress.  Yes, there will be chocolate.

October 24 – Kid City Expo at the St. Louis Science Center.  An all day event your family is sure to enjoy with special “treats” at 2pm.

November 13 – Music, Movies and Cars Trivia Night to support ABLE in St. Charles County.

Dysgraphia – Visual/Motor Processing Dysfunction Characteristics

The processing glitch that affects children the most is an interference in the writing system (spatial, visual/motor system). The process of writing has not been taken over by the child’s automatic brain, which is the right brain hemisphere. This causes the child to have to use much more energy to write. This can make a child look lazy, uncooperative and unmotivated because writing is involved in so many learning activities. See if your child has many of the following symptoms of stress in the writing system:

• Reversals in written letters both laterally and vertically, six months after being taught to write them correctly if written daily.
• Reversals in written numbers.
• Poor spacing in writing.
• Difficulty copying from book or board.
• Resistance to learning or writing cursive.
• Displaying awkward writing posture, with eye and hand very close together.
• No “helping hand” used when writing despite being instructed to do so.
• Failure to complete written assignments despite performing well on tests.
• Spaces math papers poorly.
• Tells great stories orally, but writes very little.
• Leaves out letters in a spelling test, but could spell the word orally correctly.
• Wants to do all math “in his head,” no matter how long the problem is.

Tips & Techniques: Half

Pencil-and-paper, symbolic computations with fractions should wait until a student has a firm grasp of the concepts involved from a verbal-reasoning point of view. The following exercises should be done orally with students (so we’ve written, for example, “one-half” instead of ½”.)

Addition with Half:

“One-half plus one-half equals a whole” is the basic notion for adding fractions.
Then, “two and one-half plus three and one-half” can be thought of as:
”two plus three is five” (add the whole numbers),
”one-half plus one-half equals a whole” (add the fractions), and
”five and one are six” (combine the results).

Subtraction with Half:

“Seven take-away two and one-half” is often answered by kids as “five and one-half” because they subtract the whole numbers and just “bring down” the half. They don’t realize that they must “break-into” the whole to get the answer. Here’s how to show them the right way to think about this question.

Hold up seven fingers, five on the left hand and two on the right, and say, “Here are seven.”
Next, put down the two fingers on the right hand and say, “I’ve taken away two, so how many are left?” (five)
Then say, “I have five left. Now I’ll take away half, so how much is left?” Now, fold down the first joint on the thumb of the left hand. (Four and one-half).

This demonstration will help students realize that they must “break-into” the whole.

The Science of Stars

Math is the language of science. It’s also the language of the stars – at least, the way NASA sees them. You might guess that the math used in space exploration is very advanced, and you’d be partly right; but there are also many aspects of space science that you can understand with math that you learn in high school!

One of the most basic math problems involved in any space launch is describing the space shuttle’s motion. This requires a good understanding of coordinate systems, which we use to figure out the spacecraft’s position and orientation, and also describe any changes during flight!

If we want to understand how solar radiation is absorbed into the Earth’s atmosphere, we learn about logarithms. Simple algebra helsp us compare how much farther the Hubble Space Telescope can see into the universe, than a regular telescope on the ground. By finding the Least Common Multiple of the number of years it taks Jupter (12 yrs) and Saturn (30 yrs) to revolve around the Sun, we calcuate how often we on Earth see them close together in the night sky (every 60 years!)

Over the years, space exploration has stimulated the growth of many of the concepts you learn in your math classroom today, so it’s not surprising that much of the math you learn can still be applied to understand space! So, the next time you look at the night sky, keep those lessons in mind, and soon you’ll be seeing the stars in a whole new way.