Starting off 2014

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a restful winter break like I did. It sure was hard getting back into the routine of waking up early in the morning. I can’t believe that we have made it through half of the year already.
Please let your kid enjoy this beautiful weekend OUTSIDE! The poor kids were stuck inside all four days this week during recess because it was either too cold or wet from the rain.
 

In math, at this point students are expected to be able to count up to 120. We did a lot of practice on counting on from various numbers and skip counting FORWARD and BACKWARDS by 1's, 2's, 5's, 10's in English AND Vietnamese. It's a hard concept for children to count backwards in English but to count it in Vietnamese...it really impressed me :)

We worked on counting to 120 for two days and then worked on even and odd numbers for the last two days by playing various games.

 

For my more advanced kiddos, I had them add two 2-digit numbers for more of a challenge. Next week, we will be working on comparing numbers.

Whenever your child brings home work done in school with multiple colors on their paper, it means they did the activity with a partner. Each partner picks a color and writes in that color. The color of the writing tells me which partner did what. If there is more of one color, it tells me either one partner was doing all the work or one partner was being bossy. Eeks! The students have really gotten the hang of this strategy. It also teaches them how to share and work with each other J

 

 

There are many different things available in the math center for the kids to do after they have finish their work. It’s amazing how a lot of the students become creative and make up their own math games with the math manipulatives we have in the classroom. I thought the kids were just having a good time playing Jenga when I reminded them that it had to be math related. They told me they were playing Jenga but using the pieces and writing down subtraction problems with the pieces they pull out.

 

 

Silly Quote of the Week:

We played an even and odd game with our table mates on Thursday that included rolling an "even/odd die." I told them that it took me a long time to make all the dice and that since it's made out of paper, we don't want to squish it so we have to be verrrry careful when we roll it. We have to treat it like a baby and be very gentle with it.

R: "Well then, why would you roll a baby?"

***Don’t forget, this upcoming Friday (January 17^th) is our class picture day!

 *** This upcoming week, we will be testing the children with the  MOY DRA & TPRI test. (middle of the year reading tests)
*** I will be out Thursday, January 23rd for a training.