Thank you as always to our valued volunteers! We did the draw for our trip volunteers this week, thanks to those who put their names forward. We drew out Stuart Smith and Disa Almeida to accompany us. I am also working on a date for a "Scientist in the School" visit to take place IN our classroom and will let you know when I have the date and how many volunteers the scientist would like help from. We follow the same process, collect all the names for everyone interested and draw how many we are allotted. Stay tuned!
We are enjoying seeing all of the 100 Day projects, the kids are doing a good job presenting and many of us are beginning to see the relationships between numbers and the patterns evident in a 100 square. We are getting really fast at counting by groups too - 10's, 5's, 2's, even 20's, 25's and 50's! Woohoo! Having taught up to Grade 5, I can tell you that memorization only goes so far. It is the relationships between numbers and deep understanding that is SO much more important and so much more critical to problem solving than good memorization!
Like knowing...
-if 7-5=2 then 27-5=22 and 37-5=32 and so on
- if I can count 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,then I can count 21,22,23,24,25 or 51,52,53,54,55 and so on
- 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 is telling me 1,2,3,4,5 groups of ten
- if 1+1=2 then 100+100=200 and 1000+1000=2000 and so on
- if 10 groups of 10 is 100 then 5 groups will have 20 things because 5 is half of 10 and 10 is half of 20
Some of your children are excellent at this and have in fact solved and said ALL of the facts above!
There is one group of projects left for Monday and then we will send home the ziplocs. Thank you for your help!
Monday we celebrate the actual 100 th day of school with our activity party. Please send your child with 100 of something - for example raisins, baby carrots, tiny tomatoes, pretzels, shreddies, fruitloops, marshmallows, goldfish etc etc to put in our snack mix - everyone will then share the mix for snack that morning. Thanks to those who already have! The kids will create a few 100 day and a few Valentine's Day crafts over the morning. If your child will be sharing Valentine cards with the class you may send those Monday if you are able to as well. It takes quite a while for the kids to all put their cards into each other's bags so starting Monday is OK!h
Poetry books came home today with two new poems and the kids were told they could add some colour to the "Let's Count Valentines" poem as we ran out of time to do that in class! We were also treated to a live show today as singer Chris McKhool performed for the K-grade 3 age group this morning. The kids enjoyed hearing him and seeing the variety of instruments he brought from around the World to show us. This is an example of where fundraising dollars such as that from the QSP cookie dough campaign (running right now until Feb. 17) are spent in a school - for shows, trips, equiptment and more!
This week looks like:
Monday - 100 Day party AM, NO LIB/IT Day 5, Reports home PM - Junior Kindergarten only
Tuesday - Valentine's Day, Music AM, Mailbags
Wednesday - Mystery Reader AM
Thursday - Mailbags, LIB/IT PM Day 3
Friday - PA Day
Have a great week!
Ms. I.
