100 days of school!

Making hearts
Making hearts

100 Days of School 

We have spent over 100 days together at school! If you are counting there are approximately 80 days left. We spent some time talking about the things that we can do now that we couldn't do at the beginning of the year. Reading, math baskets, writing and counting were some of the ideas mentioned.
We counted 100 several times throughout the day. We decorated our hats with 100 drawings. The hats were to be interesting and colourful, not just dots or tally marks. We counted toys in the class to see how many, how long a 100 things stretch and how tall a tower with 100 things can be.  We compared the baggies of 100 things to see which ones appeared more full. 
We highlighted a grade 1 word list to see how many of 100 words we can read. It was a fun day filled with hands on activities!

Winter Olympics

We are enjoying watching some of the Olympics at school during lunch and centre time. It is a great way to see different sports and a bit of winter. We are also using the opportunity to see math being used in real life applications such as ordering numbers for the places the athletes come in, the scores going up and sometimes going down as the judges award points in skating as well as comparing bigger and smaller numbers.
As we have been talking about friendliness, generosity, courage and excellence at school and home, the Olympics are giving us other examples of these attributes to talk about. 
We are having interesting conversations about our backgrounds and the other countries. Next week we will talk about our country in more detail. We will talk about the geography this week and then lead into our own neighbourhood here on the island. 

Addition

We are starting to learn about addition. We are starting by telling stories where groups join together to make a bigger group. We are also learning that instead of writing out these stories with words, math has symbols that simplify the language (+ and =). Although the children can add on paper and dice, the underlying concept of what they are doing is a challenging one at first. 

Things that you can do at home:

  • Talk about your family's heritage and what you have seen of Canada for example How many provinces have you been to? Has your family always lived in BC? Why choose Canada/ BC? Have you seen the Rockies, the prairies, the the Great Lakes or the Atlantic Ocean?
  • When reading stories to your child look for opportunities to talk about the numbers in the story. For example Little Red Riding Hood arrives at Grandma's house to find Grandma and the wolf there, now there are 3 people at grandma's house. This works with Fairy books, Star Wars books etc.

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