Wednesday, October 20 (Pajama Day Tomorrow)

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today! There were moments of craziness but the students always did a great job of reigning it in.

In the morning, we read the story "The Rainbow Crow", and talked about the importance of oral storytelling to First Nations peoples. We also talked about how storytelling is cool because you'll never tell the story the exact same way twice - even tiny, subtle changes are bound to occur, and over time, those changes can lead to drastically different stories.

We talked about the difference between a 'fact' and an 'opinion', and the students sorted a series of statements about bats based on which category they fell under. For example, "Bats are creepy", "Bats are scary", and "Bats are interesting" are all opinions about bats, even if many of us may agree with them.

We continued to work on 2-digit subtraction with regrouping, and I am finding it so much easier to teach this year than in previous years! I think the Grade 2/3 split actually lends itself quite well to many of these more complex math concepts. Having a stronger understanding of basic facts and place value makes a big difference.

In the afternoon, we did Daily 5 and Gym, and read an awesome story from Wayside School with a valuable lesson. In the story, Joy steals another student's delicious lunch, eats it, blames her classmates, and gets away with it. The other students are upset of course, but they get over it pretty quickly. Yet for the rest of the school year, every time joy has a delicious lunch, it tastes terrible.

The students shared some insightful comments about how feeling guilty is often much worse than the consequence of telling the truth.

Tomorrow is a school-wide Pajama Day!

Have a nice night,

Zac