It has been a week full of exploration, multiplication and choices. We’ve had some changes so we’ll see Mrs. Fremeau during lunch Mondays and Fridays, but she’ll spend the majority of her time in 2I (Mrs. Ibey had her baby) and 3CL. Miss DiPietro will be joining our classroom. We met her yesterday and enjoyed having her in our classroom.

S.E.L. Focus – Responsible Decision Making

            This week we focused on the decision making pillar of S.E.L. We discussed what being responsible means and ways we could show we were responsible. Some of the children were surprised that putting things away, taking care of supplies, or walking quietly through the halls are all ways of showing that we are responsible. We talked about not blaming others or saying that our behavior was caused by someone else. That is a challenge.

The three statements that are guiding our self-evaluations are:

• I am accountable for what I do and for how I act and behave.
• I do the right thing at the right time.
• I know others can trust and depend on me.

The class did decide that we should have a behavior plan of some kind. We had a long and important conversation about how this could work. The class was very candid and didn’t want those who find it difficult to manage themselves or make responsible choices to be blamed for that. “If they feel bad and disappointed, they’ll never learn.” Each of the children wrote down what they thought we should try. Next week we’ll develop a plan and set some reasonable goals to see if we can become more aware of our decisions and more self-managing.

Managing Mastery of Multiplication

            We’ve been learning how multiplication is a quicker way of adding equal groups or sets. It’s repeated addition. We’ve been reading and creating arrays. We know about the commutative property and are sure the 6×5 is the same as 5×6. We began to develop our fact chart so we can keep track of the facts we know and the facts we still need to work on. At first it seemed that learning 100 facts would be impossible and then we began to fill in our chart. We all know the 1’s facts. We all know the 2’s. We all know the 5’s and the 10’s. That’s 40 known facts. And because we know the commutative property we know all the “turn around facts” as well. It turns out we know 64 of those 100 facts already and that doesn’t include things like 3×3. We decided it was a doable project. We’ll begin with the 3’s next week.

This week we also learned about the distributive property so we could tackle using multiplication with larger amounts. We looked at large arrays and discovered ways of breaking them apart into manageable groups – blocking off rows of 5 or 10. You’ll see some examples in your child’s work this week. We also practiced using this property in problems – if there were 6 pumpkins and each pumpkin had 123 seeds, how many seeds would there be altogether?

As you go through your weekend, challenge yourself to see how many places you can find arrays – in windowpanes, floor tiles, food packaging… It’s surprising how many you’ll find when you begin looking. It will be a great way for the children to see that multiplication is all around them.

Bit and Pieces –

• We are continuing our animal research and are planning our classroom zoo. Paper mache is so much fun!
• We’re learning about geography, continents and habitats.
• Each week since the beginning of school we’ve been learning to look at our world as a scientist We observed, drew and painted leaves. We followed the scientific process from hypothesis to conclusion with our Raisin and Soda experiment. And we looked at shells to document what we know and what we wonder. Asking questions is something that drives innovation and creation. We are going to grow from those experiences as we begin a science unit about Invisible Forces.
• Enclosed is our next book order. If you’d like to order books please send to order in by next Wednesday.