Our Week – October 11

For a short week, we certainly fit a lot in.  We continued our weather research.  We’re finding out a lot of interesting facts.  We began student blogging this week. The class is very excited about creating a first post.  Thanks to those families who were able to read them and leave a comment.  Please share the blog url with family and friends, near and far.   It is exciting to open the blogs and find comments from grandparents, aunts and uncles. Thank you for your time and attention with this.

As we prepared for the open house it was interesting to stop and realize how much we’ve been doing in our first thirty days of school.  Thank you for joining us last night.  I hope you found the information helpful.  Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions at they arise.  If you were unable to attend, please look for the hand-outs in your child’s Friday envelope.

Learning Properties of Multiplication

We’ve been learning how to create and read arrays.  This practice enabled all of us to understand how the Commutative Property of Multiplication works.  It doesn’t matter if you have 3 rows of 4 or 4 rows of 3.  Both equal twelve.  To show this understanding we made buildings to create Multiplication Main Street. Our buildings show how this property works.

We also learned how to break arrays up into manageable parts.  For instance when looking at an array that is 5 rows of 13, we can break the 13 into 10 and 3 and easily do the multiplication then: 5×10 and 5×3.  After working to organize our thinking with arrays, we learned how to use the Distributive Property with multiplication. We’ve still got some work to do with this property before everyone feels fully certain of what they are doing, especially when hundreds turn to thousands.

Living the Life of a Reader

 

 

 

 

 

 

As part of our goal setting process, we’ve begun talking about what it means to live the life of a reader.  We’ve been reading poems and books about books, reading stories and loving certain kinds of books as a way to discover all the different types of reading people do. The children have been asked to think back and talk to you about books that were and/or are important to them. They could be favorites from when they were younger – books they asked to have read over and over, or they may be books they spent so much time with they could recite them without even looking. They can also be books that have been read aloud to them at home or at school.  They could be books of topics they are interested in.

Hopefully each child can bring in a collection of between 3 and 5 (2 and 6 are also fine) books, maps, magazines, charts… texts that have been important to them in becoming the reader they are today. We’ll create a reading museum with these texts on Tuesday, October 16.

Bits and Pieces –

  • We’ve begun our fourth chapter read-aloud of the year, The Wild Robot. This is a fantasy, full of rich description. The setting is important in this book.  Ask your child what he or she remembers about the island where Roz has washed up.
  • On Thursday two North Hampton firefighters visited our grade, Steve and Brendan. They shared some important fire safety tips with the classes and answered many, many different questions.
  • In Open Circle this week we began discussing how people know when they feel upset and where in their body they experience that emotion. Some in the class feel that emotion in their stomach, while other feel it in the chest and still others feel it as a tightness in their shoulders.It was an interesting discussion and one that we’ll continue as we learn to recognize the many side of “upset.”
  • We have continued to work on our Multiple Intelligence (MI) pie charts. We’re having fun noticing all the ways we are “smart.”

4 thoughts on “Our Week – October 11

  1. Sounds like a great week!
    Hoping we can still find Charlie’s old favorites books … some of them were so “loved” that we may not have held onto to them. 😕

    • Thank you for letting us know you found our post about the week. We’ll hope you can even list some titles – from there we can print covers at least.
      Thank you for your support.
      3E

  2. Sounds like a lot of fun! Your array city look wonderful and bright! I can tell you are all really applying your knowledge of multiplication to create each building!

    From,
    Mrs Bongiovanni
    (aka Mrs. Eaves Daughter)

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