Wednesday, January 20

 Hi parents,

We had a good but loud day today. In the morning, I taught the students about 2-digit addition and subtraction. We mostly talked about how to write out 2-digit problems in a way that makes it easy to line up the ones, tens, hundreds, etc. Organization is key!

This is one of my favourite things to teach because of how excited Grade 1's get about it. Being able to solve a "hard" math problem like "111 + 111" by repeatedly doing "1 + 1" makes them feel like they've uncovered the greatest secret in all of math. For the grade 2s, this math is a bit more familiar, but still an important skill to practice. We'll start addressing problems with 'regrouping' over the next few weeks, which is where things really start to get tricky.

In Animated Literacy, we looked at the letter Q, arguably the weirdest letter in the whole alphabet. Quentin Quail was the rep.

We did a bit of graphing review today, and the students were given data sets of farm animals and asked to create their own bar graphs. They did pretty well with this, especially since we haven't done much graphing since earlier in the year. I noticed the class had trouble with "How Many More ____ than ____" questions. We'll work on that.

In the afternoon, Ms. Thaxter led a lesson around the classic story "Wilfred Gordan McDonald Partridge". The students wrote about the who's, what's, where's, why's, and when's found within the story.

We ended the day with a practice spelling quiz, Classroom of Doom (which is a math game), and some storytelling. The students have been really, really into telling scary stories lately, and their skills are actually pretty good! Surprisingly focused and not ramble-y. The ones that end in jump scares are especially hilarious too.

Have a nice night,

Zac