Thursday, February 3

 Hi parents,

We had a good day today! In the morning, students finished up work from earlier in the week, including our Iqaluit reading activity from yesterday, spelling practice, and morning math. 

We went over the "P" in "COPS", which stands for "Punctuation". In spite of me stressing the importance of writing in complete sentences that begin with a capital and end with a period, virtually nobody seemed to take this to heart throughout our Droon novel study, and so the students worked for 30 minutes straight on editing their Droon work from previous weeks. Having to do that much editing in one go is no fun, but I'm hoping it helps to teach a valuable lesson - "do it nice, or do it twice!" 

The shining moment of today was undoubtedly the open-ended math problem the students took on. It went like this:

Subway is giving away free cookies. They bake 24 cookies. A group of kids show up to get some cookies. They each leave with the same number of cookies, and Subway had no cookies left. How many kids could have come in, and how many cookies did each student have?

The students worked in partners and did a fantastic job putting together small posters to show their multiple answers, and how they arrived at each one. Normally with this sort of task, at least a couple posters end up looking super messy and disorganized, and I accept that as part of the learning process, but this time they were all super well done. Plus, the students already seemed to have a really solid understanding of division, which we've only just started learning. 

In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, and read a story called "The Seven Chinese Brothers". It's a Chinese folk tale and it's really entertaining. The students sat quietly for 25 minutes because they were so into it.

We ended the day with Music.

Tomorrow is our spelling quiz - I really recommend doing a practice quiz at home, if you have time, because it's been a hectic 4-day week and I fear spelling practice may have been a bit neglected. 

Have a nice night,

Zac