Monday, October 31

 Hi parents,

Our Halloween day was a pretty big success.

The highlight was definitely the parade - it was so great to have parents visit the school again!

Students wrote about their costumes, or, if they were feeling especially literary, they responded to the prompt: :"What is a monster?"

We did a subtraction 'check-in' (which is basically just a zero-stakes pop quiz), to see how everyone's doing with subtraction. We have quite a bit of work to do still with the borrowing / regrouping strategy. I've noticed that a lot of students are awesome at doing 2-digit subtraction problems with mental math strategies - which is usually the hardest way to do them! However, with the changes in curriculum, we're now expected to do addition and subtraction with numbers up to 100,000, so I think it's a good idea for everyone to learn the classic written algorithm too.

Practicing at home will undoubtedly help. Even just 2-3 problems every day, starting with 2-digit numbers, will make a huge difference.

Here are a few examples you could try to get you started.....

Beginner:           42 - 15 =            61 - 13 =                55 - 27 =             82 - 48 =

Intermediate:      276 - 49 =         351 - 44 =             723 - 18 =            682 - 154

Advanced:          2005 - 765 =                618 - 39 =                     10101 - 437 =

Master:     Word problem (e.g. I have 2005 cookies,  I eat 765, how many cookies do I have left?)

It would probably be a good idea for most students to start with beginner and work their way up.

We will also be doing daily practice in class, as well as lessons with the materials to help students build a more well-rounded understanding.

Have a nice night!

Zac