Dear Parents,
I sent home two math things this weekend. One was our monthly graph of the weather, which I sent home in place of our weekly letter. I hope that you'll discuss their graph with your student and talk about why they've come to the conclusions they have. Creating and interpreting graphs are part of the Data Management strand of the Ontario math curriculum. Friday was also our Terry Fox walk, so a busy day in the classroom.
The other sheet is meant to be finished up at home. Some students managed to finish their graph quickly and others took a much longer time, so the worksheet follows up on some of the concepts we've been looking at this past 2 weeks in the Number Sense and Numeration strand of the JUMP math workbook. Because I've already received one questioning email, I thought there might be more questions.
The first side of the sheet asks students to count the letters in the words. The boxes are meant to help them show that they are counting on. So, after each word they place the number they've counted to and begin counting again from that number.
E. g. The (3) cat (6) is (8) black (13).
This is a very helpful strategy when beginning to add. Starting at the higher number and "counting on" means that when students are adding 3+3, they can start at 3 and count up ("4, 5, 6") rather than needing to start again at 0 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The answer is the same, but when we start running out of fingers, counting on helps immensely.
On the other side of the page, students are asked to read 2 digital numbers and say which team is winning (i.e. Which number is greater?). Some students are still reversing numbers, so 2 and 5 can be easy to mix up on a calculator.
We're working on using vocabulary like greater, more, less, and fewer instead of just bigger and smaller, when comparing numbers.
Then, students can reverse their counting on strategy to find the difference (e.g. 9 is winning against 5. Show 9 fingers, count off 5. 4 are left over, so 4 is the difference).
Even if you don't finish, I would very much like to see where students are with the JUMP math worksheet. Please return it on Monday, so we can look at it as a class.
Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan
