Happy New Year!
I hope you have an enjoyable time with your families – reflexed or action packed as you like it. It was great to be back – glad for the shorter week at first so we could get back into the swing and ready to go.
Revisiting Goals – Making Resolutions
This week we used a quote from Antione de Saint-Exupery: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” to renew our conversation about learning goals. The children reexamined their goals from the fall – they could decide to keep them or change them. Once they had decided on the 2 or 3 things they would like to work on at school, the job was to make a plan. We will continue to work on this and add in ways to look for progress over time as a way to provide evidence that the goal has achieved.
As a class we are making spelling a priority. The first part of our goal is to work on spelling all the first three hundred most frequently written words accurately. We are going to track this progress with class percentages and identifying personal demons. We are developing individual dictionaries and will begin word study groups to focus on areas of need.
Sets and Arrays
We began our study of multiplication by learning two different activities: Circles and Stars (many of you found that in the homework folders) and How Many? How Long? The first activity helps children develop an understanding of multiplication as a process of finding the combined total of like sets. It adds to their understanding of skip counting. The second activity is done with Cuisinairre Rods – these are math manipulatives with values from 1 to 10 – each value is a different color. The children roll a di – once to see how many rods they will take and a second time to see how long the rods will be. Next they create an array with those. The game comes in competing to see which player will be able to claim more of the area of a 10X10 grid. Both activities are fun and clear ways for children to understand what the process of multiplication is and how the operation is represented mathematically.
Bits and Pieces –
- We are nearly half way through Wildwood , our class read-aloud.
- The children feel that they will be ready to share their expertise at a class museum in the 3rd week of January. The plan would be to hold the museum from 6:15 to 7:15 in the evening either Wednesday or Thursday evening. Be on the look out for that invitation.
- As always – please check out our blog: 3enews@edublogs.org Student posts are coming soon –and the pictures add so much more.
Happy Weekend!
this post is illustrated with photographs taken by Brandon and Ella