Tuesday, January 7

 Hi parents,

We had another good day today. In the morning, we revisited our year-long exploration of "Safe and Active Routes to School". We're taking on a project that will hopefully improve the pick-up / drop-off experiences of families at our school, and also help kids start their days off on a good note. 

Basically, we're hoping to encourage more families to drop kids off across the field in the morning, rather than in front of the school. Anyone who has ever driven by our school in the morning knows how crazy the traffic can be. This project aims to alleviate that congestion and help kids get some extra physical activity and outside time before school, which should help them focus throughout the day.

We're going to be making pamphlets to send home that go over our plan and outline the benefits of walking to school - even just part of the way.

Anyway - today the whole class walked around the perimeter of the school, made observations about the signage, and shared thoughts around safe / unsafe behaviours. That took us all the way to snack.

After that, we wrote sentences for spelling words. The challenge was, each sentence had to start with a different word.

In math, I gave the kids some multiplication word problems that challenged them to think a bit more abstractly with math. They've clearly got the computation aspects of math down - if you give them two numbers and tell them to add, subtract, or multiply, they've got it no problem. But we had some trouble with applying math to solve problems that weren't so simple. We'll keep working at that.

We ended the day with music.

Have a nice night,

Zac

Monday, January 6

Happy New Year!

We had an awesome first day back. In the morning, the students wrote about their Winter Break, or New Years Resolutions, in their journals. We had a great discussion about goal-setting, and how it's more important to to consider the actions you'll take on a daily / weekly basis than the end result.

In math, we brought out the Stamp Game again, and reviewed addition and subtraction with regrouping. Most students have still got it down, others just required this small refresher and then were back on track.

We went over this week's spelling words, and did a quick recap of all of the letter blends we've covered so far. 

We did Daily LA, and ended the day with French. We learned the phrases:

"Je suis content", "Je suis triste", and "Je suis fatigue". We reviewed the French we'd learned earlier as well.

Have a nice night,

Zac

Spelling Words (Week of January 5)

Spelling List A (Jan. 6 – 10)

tall	neck	shop	Chad	they
only	yard	lord	hurt	laces

 

Spelling List B (Jan. 6 – 10)

called	trucks	should	China	there
story	large	forum	murky	once

 

Spelling List C (Jan. 6 – 10)

wallet	unlucky	shouldn’t	chimpanzee	father
thirty	gardener	mentor	burden	dancer

This week we're reviewing a bunch of the big letter blends we've covered already. These are all words the students have been quizzed on, but having them all mixed up will definitely add a degree of difficulty. We'll be sure to practice every day in class.

Good luck!