Thursday, November 3

 Hi parents,

We had a good day today, the afternoon was a little crazy but that is the way it goes after the first Fun Lunch of the year!

In the morning, the students worked on Concrete Poems. We actually started this yesterday but I forgot to include it in the blog. Students were given pre-written poetry, and challenged to rewrite it as a Concrete Poem. A Concrete Poem is a basically a poem that looks like the topic. They use spacing and fonts creatively to help create poetic effect.

A concrete poem about a campfire

We are still working on subtraction with regrouping. While I've noticed a ton of progress working one on one with students, their independent subtraction check-ins are still not quite there, so we're going to keep on chugging away at it. Practicing multi-step subtraction problems is also a great way for students to work on their fact fluency - when you solve a problem like "224 - 188 = ___", you're essentially solving three basic fact subtraction problems, while also bringing in knowledge of place value. It's a full brain workout.

In the afternoon, we had Music, and then tried to work on our tree poster research project. Unfortunately this project has been so riddled with technology issues, people losing their work, and group confusion that we're going to have to put it on hold for the time being and learn about trees in a different way. I think it may have been too early in the unit to take on a project like this.

At the end of the day, we learned how to use dictionaries, and tried to use them to look up unfamiliar words from 'Riding with Private Malone'. Unfortunately this lesson also didn't work out in our favour as many of the unfamiliar words weren't in there! Still it was a good way to introduce dictionaries. The kids were weirdly enthusiastic about getting to look up definitions, even when they couldn't find them.

Tomorrow is our spelling quiz! Have a nice night,

Zac