Thursday, October 3

 Hi parents,

I'm going to be away tomorrow so this Blog will be extra detailed. 

We had yet another good day today. We continued addressing the topic of communities, transportation, and connectedness. The students were given clip-art versions of the building we brainstormed yesterday, and challenged to cut and glue them into their sketchbooks to create a community. We talked about the reasons for wanting certain services to be closer together or further apart, and we even got into the 'traffic safety' side of things, as students started adding speed limits, crosswalks, and sidewalks to their towns!

I am incredibly happy with how this all turned out. It really exceeded my expectations. I am certain that the class will get a lot out of our residency on Safe Routes to School next week.

In math, we once again turned our attention to the Stamp Game, this time using it to teach the process of regrouping in subtraction problems. Subtraction with regrouping is probably the hardest thing we will cover in math until Grade 4 long division. The Montessori Materials do an amazing job of helping students see why the algorithm works. Honestly I didn't even understand how it worked until I started teaching. Building this understanding will take time, and any practice you'd like to do at home will surely be helpful.

In the afternoon we revisited our Lego town from yesterday, and the students took their buildings off. We then worked together to design the community in a more logical way. This time we really only needed two big roads, instead of 20 small ones.

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Before / After

Tomorrow is our spelling quiz! Best of luck, and have a nice weekend!

Zac