Wednesday, October 27

 Hi parents,

Sorry about the lack of blog posts yesterday, I was having some internet trouble.

Today was a good day for our class all around - the students wrote rough copies, and good copies, of paragraphs all about bats. This is kind of our last big bat activity and I was happy to see the kids putting so much effort in! We talked about how neatness, spelling, and content are extra important when writing a 'good copy'.

We did something called a "Math Forum" today, which is basically where students are given a difficult math problem and asked to work in partners to solve it using multiple methods. The point of a Math Forum is to challenge kids to think outside of the box, and approach problems in new ways. The problems we addressed today were subtraction word problems, and I was happy to see that many students immediately used the written 'borrowing' strategy that we've been doing in class. However, I think it's important to realize that there are other ways that work as well, and in some situations, it may be more useful to apply other strategies.

The other purpose of a math forum is to emphasize the importance of clearing explaining how you solved a problem, and illustrating your thought process. 

Anyway, today was our first attempt at it, and all around it went pretty well! We'll be sure to try another one soon to see how we can improve.

I told a scary story to the class at the end of the day. Usually the class watches videos of cute baby animals after a scary story to help them relax, but unfortunately the YouTube ads are so long and un-skippable that we didn't get a chance. 

Have a nice night!

Zac