Thursday, September 3

 Hi parents,

We had another good day today. We attended the Welcome Back assembly in the morning, and talked about another big idea our school is focusing on this year - the idea of 'voice', and how you can use your voice to make the world a better place. Ms. Rooke and Ms. Watson read a book about this to the school.

We had our first Music class today.

We also did some list writing, in which the students had to write four separate lists of their top 3 / 5 ______. For example, "Top 5 Movies", "Top 3 Foods", etc.

List writing is a great way to get reluctant writers started. Its generally less overwhelming to have to think of and write individual words than to write sentences.

In math, we reviewed and explored the concept of place value and the number '100'. Students worked in groups to create 10 x 10 grids of cards to show how 100 can be represented. We talked about the pattern of place value, and how 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000 are all related. 

This year Grade 3s will be investigating numbers up to 100,000. Grade 4's will also do this, and they'll look at decimals too. The best way to understand these 'uncountable' numbers is to build a really strong understanding of numbers to 100, and apply those patterns to the less tangible number problems. 

Tomorrow we will be having our first spelling quiz of the year, and I'll send those home at the end of the day. We'll also meet our buddy class!

Have a nice night,

Zac

Lots of things on the work period wall for the first week of school