Friday the 13th

 Hi parents,

We had a great Friday! The students did an excellent job on the spelling quiz - it was the best one yet! 

We watched another basic video about gravity and friction, and how playground equipment is affected by these forces. For instance, the students learned that through friction, they are able to slowly descend a fire pole, rather than just falling to the ground. They also learned that gravity is the force responsible for allowing them to descend at all! We went outside to the playground for some hands on learning.

When we got back to class, the students wrote about a time when they felt 'unlucky'. We talked about how 13 is often seen as an unlucky number (even in Number Blocks!) while 7 is seen as lucky.

I've wanted to start teaching the class more about how addition and subtraction can help us make sense of real world situations, so today, I showed the students how they can use pictures to represent word problems. The kids really liked the activity and I think it would work well at home too, if anyone is interested in trying it.

Basically, you could start by giving your child a number statement, such as: "There are six bunnies in a field." Give them ~1 minute to draw a simple picture of the bunnies, then make up something that happens that changes the number of bunnies. For example, "4 more bunnies show up", or "3 bunnies leave", or even "suddenly there were twice as many bunnies". Your child can adjust their picture to represent the situation, by drawing more bunnies, or crossing some out. This process helps them visualize the process of adding, subtracting, or multiplying, and make connections to how they can use these operations to find math problems in the world around them!

If you happen to try this activity out over the weekend, please feel free to send it with your child on Monday and I could probably give out some homework points.

Also, here's a homework question for parents: Who is the villain in the movie "Friday the 13th"?

Have a nice weekend,

Zac