February 21 - 24th

This week was chilly and forced us to be indoors however we had an awesome week together. Here is a look at our week:

Math - This week we centered on addition using the strategy of adding on. To count on, students need to identify the largest number in the equation and count on from it. This means they need to understand the communicative property (turnarounds or flip-flop facts). Students must understand that 1 + 5 = 5 + 1.  Students practiced this strategy using a beaded number line. This allowed them the opportunity to count out the number of beads for each number in an addition equation and then identify the larger number and count on to find the sum. 

Literacy - 

This week our phonics focus was on the FLSZ Rule which states that when a one-syllable word has a short vowel sound and ends in one of those four consonant sounds, the final consonant is usually doubled (eg buzz, boss, will, off). 

We also worked on the high frequency words - many, then, them, these, so. 

Reading passages and words should have came home with your child to practice with you at home on Wednesday/Thursday. 

On Wednesday it was Pink Shirt Day - we discussed the significance of this day, learned how the day began and discussed the motto - "Lift Each Other Up". We read a number of anchor texts that prompted discussions. 

Students were asked to use the strategy of think- pair - share to identify: Ways to make the World a Better Place. 

They came up with an impressive list of thoughtful ideas!

We will continue our work on the themes of Friendship, Belonging and Building Community as we prepare for our tentative sharing assembly (more information to come) on March 8th. 

Puppet Residency - Students were immersed into our puppet residency this week. We had lots of fun exploring what a shadow puppet was and ways to create them. Students were given the opportunity to discover tools, materials and ways to build shadow puppets and were very excited for the opportunity.