FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 23rd CLASSROOM UPDATE

Hi Parents,

I’m hoping our students are coming home and sharing all the great learning from our classroom!  We’ve had a busy week of learning:

LEARNING SKILLS (that’s right, the same that we see on the report card)

We spent a few days discussing and modelling our Work Habits and Learning Skills.  We created “I can” statements to set goals for ourselves when we are in the classroom.  We’ve posted our goals and we will use them as the year progresses.

LANGUAGE

WRITING

We have  continued building our writing program by focusing on special people and places.  Students have created a bank of memories and are in the process of creating meaningful stories by “exploding” their specific memory.  As I’ve stated earlier in the blog, it’s really important that students feel that their life and memories are worth writing about. When the writing purpose is meaningful to the student, it engages students to work harder and focus. This week we focused on peer editing.  Together we set success criteria on how to edit our work.  We realized that when we read our own writing, it makes sense to us, but when a friend reads our writing, it can sound different.  We focused on listening to our friends read our writing.  We asked ourselves can we add something more, can we clarify anything?

SPELLING – There is nothing in our curriculum that states we have to run a spelling program in our classroom. I will be using the WORDS THEIR WAY program. Some of you are familiar with the program. It involves students recognizing sounds and patterns in specific words.  I have given the students a spelling challenge and I will now assess it to create groups within the classroom based on how each of students decodes words. This will give me an opportunity to work in small groups during our language block to help students focus on the patterns within our language.  Next week, your child will be bringing home a set of words to sort  based on specific consonant and vowel patterns.

READING

I’m almost finished our benchmarks to determine students reading levels.  For students reading below grade level, I will be sending home the Borrow a Book Bags.  For students reading at grade level and above, I feel comfortable that students are reading daily with “JUST RIGHT” books at home or from the library. Starting in October, we will have new logins for the RAZ-KIDS program.  Again, more information to come once the school has purchased the subscription.  I ask that students read for at least 20 minutes/night.

MATH

DREAMBOX

Dreambox is now set up and letters have gone home with username and passwords.  I know as parents we try and regulate “device time” in our homes, but I can’t stress enough how valuable Dreambox is to student learning.  All of the activities on Dreambox coincide and reinforce the math strategies we are learning in class.  Dreambox has taken over the concept of math worksheets being sent home.  It allows students to “play” math, however data is collected on how students are answering the math problems and sent to my teacher dashboard.  The program is designed to identify students strengths and focuses on student weaknesses.  When dreambox identifies an area where your child struggles, it continues to build individual programs for your child to master the concept.  When children have mastered a concept, the program will develop higher level games that will reinforce the concept just learned.  If possible, I am asking students to work on Dreambox for at least 20 minutes/night.

MATH TALK

Every math lesson starts with a math talk to warm our brains up – basically it’s mental math using strings (patterns) so that students can identify quick ways to solve addition, subtraction and soon multiplication.  Students develop math talk to prove their thinking.  Take a look at the math addition string in the picture (single digit to start) of which students were able to reflect on how they solved the previous question to help solve the next problem. I’m really focusing on how students can manipulate numbers in order to solve.  Please don’t be concerned with single digit addition.  If students can master addition 1-20 they will be able to identify math patterns in numbers beyond 20.  This week we have focused on friendly numbers (5 and 10) and doubles.

MATH INVESTIGATIONS and CONGRESS (MATH MEETINGS)

After our math talks, I focus on a small mini lesson involving a math problem – I call this a math investigation.  The meaningful math problem is designed so that students can use previous knowledge to enter the problem but students need to investigate deeper to solve the problem. Depending on the math problem and what I’m looking for we may do collaborative work or independent work. The problems are designed so that we are not focused on the teachers strategy, we focus on the variety of ways we can see and solve the problem.  Have a look at the picture involving growing patterns.  How interesting that 2 students could see the problem so differently – but again both answers are correct.

After each investigation, we wrap up our lesson with a math meeting (congress) to share our math thinking.  This then allows students to view different strategies and articulate their math thinking.  If a student can articulate their math thinking, then they truly understand what they are doing.  Students are working on a variety of math sentence starters to create discussion during congress.

Enjoy a restful weekend!

Remember Monday is a P.A. day.