Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

We had a great first day back everyone was rested and ready to work -

1001 Things to Spot  is a much loved series of books in any classroom.  We used In the Sea today to provide a context for using place value to add with regrouping.  We began by estimating the number of items to be found on the page and then used interlocking cubes to build the number of items to be found on each page.  We were left with 10 'trains' of blocks to add together which helped us to focus on strategies for combining the numbers.  Several different strategies were put forward and we worked through each one to determine there were 63 items under the sea.  We will continue this work tomorrow with a different page.

Sound and Hearing is the science unit we started before the break.  Today we worked with a partner to flip through books we have in the classroom and find some interesting facts.  Ask your child what they may have found on their own.

We used 'My Fantastic Elastic Brain' and Benny the Bookworm to talk about how our brains work while we are reading.  We found many facts about the brain that were very interesting, but bottom line, the most important, was that making mistakes allows the brain to grow!!  Must be why we all have erasers.  Students wrote in their journals what they learned about their brain and drew a picture of the the body parts they use while reading.