Monday, November 6

 Hi parents,

Today we started to talk about Remembrance Day. We had an awesome class discussion about peace, and war, and the students asked thoughtful questions about why war happens, and what it would take to achieve world peace. We studied the song "Ridin' With Private Malone" and had a great discussion about that too.

For this week's journal writing, we tried to incorporate elements of paragraph writing. Students tried to begin their weekend journal writing with an engaging topic sentence, and end with a conclusion. Unfortunately this was easier said than done. I think because they're so used to starting with "On the weekend..." they had a hard time breaking away from that, so most "hooks" ended up just being "On the cold weekend..." or "On my weekend..." or "On Sunday..."

In math, we looked at subtraction problems with missing numbers. For some reason these problems always confuse students. We used the golden beads to show how you can solve a problem like "100 - ___ = 45" simply by rewriting it as "100 - 45 = ___". We talked about how both 45 and 55 are 'parts' of 100, so you can always find one by subtracting the other.

We did Daily LA and practiced this week's review spelling words.

Have a nice night!

Zac