Dear Parents,
Now that the weather is nicer, we're spending a little more time outside of the classroom. One of the students' favourite things to do for outdoor play is to visit Baird Park around the corner.
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| New things to try |
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| Cash registers in action, with posters in the background |
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| Lots of fruit on sale |
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| Today was hot, so ice cream was definitely top of mind |
In math, we've been looking at using dice to help us add numbers together. Students rolled two dice and added the results then marked off the recycling bins to show they'd gotten that result. The challenge and the learning of this activity happened most pointedly when students got frustrated at repeating results like 7, 8, and 9, but still hadn't gotten 2 or 12.
On the back was a graphing activity, where students had to see which number "won", i.e. got the most rolls. This was definitely a preferred activity for many of the students. And when that got too easy, I broke out the ten sided dice for novelty and challenge.
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| You can see both sides of the activity here. |
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| Students working together to add |
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| Counting using fingers and using crayons as counters. |
Working with students, I had the chance to model some great number sense techniques that may seem inuitive to adults, like moving counters from one group to another to show they've been counted. We also worked on counting up from the first number in the equation --i.e. starting at 7, then counting up another 5 to get the answer of 12.
Finally, here's a picture of Ms. Sawyer, who's with us this week while Ms. Moniz is away. She was hard at work this afternoon, preparing the nutritional paste for our new Monarch caterpillars. More on this to follow in coming days.
In the meantime, I'm hard at work on the June calendar. It's hard to believe the year is almost over, especially with all the things we've still got packed in!
Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan
