Happy Thursday! (and Wed)

We played a new math game called More is Better. Tonight, your child will bring home his or her first math pack. The math packs are designed to help your child practice addition, subtraction and fluency with numbers (EX: 3+2 is 5). They should also start to see the relation and connection between addition and subtraction. Our students are in VERY different places, so we have just right math packs for each child! 

Here we are practicing some simple story problems together. We usually only do this about once or twice a week. It gives us time to have quick math talks about how they solved it and whether it was adding or subtracting. Many students like the cubes, but others prefer their hands. Make sure that you encourage your child to use his or her fingers to count/add. This is developmentally appropriate. Some of our kids are moving past this....learning number facts, counting on, etc. 

We count our cubes every time we use them. Hint: There are always 10---and we always say, "Ten is always ten." You would be surprised though when you see each student still counting-I'm waiting for someone to tell me they don't have to count anymore, because they know it's 10. 

Jace shared a story about a rocket ship yesterday! 

This month, we are working on adding beautiful and interesting illustrations to our stories. 

We had to celebrate today, as this was the first day that Cyan wrote a story with the words going from left to right and she could point to each word and read it. YAY!!!!!!!!!! 

See how Miles used color in an interesting way (look at his words).....

Doing some box problems.....working on connections between addition and subtraction.

Working on seeing a tile image on the smartboard and recreating it. It helps when the students can break down the image into parts (EX: 1 and 4)

Now we're starting to make our very own tile books with different combinations! 

Happy 100th Day of School!!!!

Some cute class photos to start the day!!! 

We played a game called Balloon Pop. We talked about how many balloons we thought were on the floor--an estimate. Then, after popping, I asked them if it felt like a little bit of balloons, or a LOT of balloons. I think this really helped cement the idea that 100 is a LOT!

Here were are playing a 100 Snap Word Dice game. Very fun!!!

Silly faces!!!!!

Here we are painting 100 dots on our 100 paper!!!

Here we are having a 100 snack :) Yum, yum!

What a fun, and tiring day. Your kiddo....and their teacher....will need a bit of extra sleep tonight :)

Happy Monday!

One more day of inside recess. We can do it. Maybe I should say, "I can do it." Then we'll have to do a LOT of re-training for appropriate recess behaviors. So that should be interesting :)

So a lot of getting ready for the big day tomorrow! We were super busy :)

TGIF :) :)

Amazing teamwork. Wow. Can you believe this 'jail' they built? So good! 

Today we were practicing reading a story by looking at the pictures. Most first grade reading tests begin with a picture walk. We want to tell the book like a story--name the characters, start with 'one day', connect the pages saying 'and' and 'then.' 

Reagan and Jace were SO brave today! They showed the whole class how good they can read a story :) 

Our math problem today was: How many different ways can you show 5 with your rekenrek? (a pipe cleaner with 10 beads-5 blue and 5 green). They got into this big discussion about whether there are 6 possible answers or 3. Because if you have 1 blue and 4 green.....some think that's the same at 1 green and 4 blue--so they didn't count it. 

Hm. I asked, "Look at these number sentences." I wrote 4+1 and 1+4. I asked, "Do they add up to the same or a different number?" Then many decided that there are only 3 possible ways. Very interesting! I never told them if they were wrong or right. It's better to let them develop their own mathematical understanding and reasoning.