It's our 36th week together!

We're shakin' things up a bit in room 208! I've decided to flip our Math and Language Arts block so that we can get the "hard stuff" out of the way earlier in the day and I can capitalize on the time of the day where the kids seem to be more energized.  We've done this a few times over the last few weeks and it seems to work well for everyone. 

As part of the Math program, we have been looking at probability for the last week or so, and from those lessons I found we needed extra practice with our division skills.  Students are very good at using the cookies and plates strategy to divide.  Here's an older poster from the classroom where I've outlined how to use plates and cookies for multiplication. With division, students learn they simply do the opposite and start with the number of cookies to be shared among X number of plates. 

 

To take this to a higher level, we've started working on finding a fraction of a set of numbers, for example 1/5 of 25. There's a little chant we use to help us remember how to go about doing this. 

We didn't get to our Math Challenge today, where students would practice their skills independently, so we'll put that at the top of the list for Tuesday.  

This week's text of the week is called "I Got a New Game for my Brother" by Kenn Nesbitt, and like so many of our poems, it features a very funny twist on words.  As part of our discussions around reading fluency and what good readers do, we talk about how readers should try to make our reading sound like natural speech.  Given how short this poem is, it might be fun for us to try presenting it in character! 

On Tuesday, we'll read a very short story called "A Couch Speaks Out".  My favourite part of the day was when students visited with their elbow partner in our Breakout Rooms this afternoon to talk about what their couch would say if it could talk. Based on what they shared when we all returned to the main meeting, I think we may have a bunch of future comedy writers in our class!