Wednesday, October 14

 Hi parents,

Today was a decent day for the class, a little bit crazy in the afternoon though.

In the morning, the students watched a funny video that taught them about the history of Halloween. The video covered a lot of information, so I'd be curious to hear how much they retained from it. Basically, we learned that Halloween was originally a Celtic harvest festival, in which people believed ghosts could enter the world of the living. The celts apparently wore costumes to disguise themselves from the ghosts, and also put out food and drinks as offerings. We talked about how Halloween today is different from how it was in the past. I encourage everyone to continue this discussion at home! A big downside of the "Covid 19 classroom" is that we are not allowed to come together for a class discussion, so often our discussions get cut short because kids can't hear each other and they get distracted more easily.

In math, we continued to work on building counting skills. Students in Grade 1 are working on counting, starting from various starting points between 1- 20. Students in Grade 2 are working on the same thing, but from starting points up to and exceeding 100. 

Thank you to everyone who completed the Blog homework last night! Looking back, I should have offered a more challenging option too. In case you're working on counting at home, and it's starting to become too easy for your child, here are some other ways to count that might be a bit more challenging (in order of difficulty):

1. Count up to 20 starting at a random number.

2. Count backwards from 20.

3. Count by 2's, 5' and 10's.

4. Count by 2's starting at an odd number.

5. Count backwards by 2's from 20.

6. Count backwards by 2's starting at an odd number.

I encourage students to count using a number line before attempting it using only mental math. Anyway, those aren't homework but I hope they are helpful. :)

In the afternoon, we learned about the letter 'A", and the students coloured in "Actress Annie". We did not get to use Ipads for reading today due to excessive silliness, which sometimes bordered on rudeness.

At the end of the day, the students learned how to draw a ghost kitten, and filled in the first pages of their Halloween Monster Books.

Have a nice day!

Zac