Update for November 9-13

Dear Parents,

It was nice to meet most of you yesterday. If you were unable to meet with me and would like to do so, please let me know and I will make an appointment to do so. 

In language this week we continue to focus on making connections when we read. We also continued our focus on responding to text using examples to support our thinking. This is a skill that we will be practicing throughout the year. Our next unit in writing will be focusing on fiction narratives, or short stories. We began this unit by writing a short story completely independently without any guidance from me, so that I could see where students were before we began the unit. We will be learning more about how to write good fiction stories over the next six weeks or so.

In math, we finished up our unit on addition and subtraction strategies using mental math and adding numbers less than 100. Students did quite well overall in demonstrating their ability to add and subtract these numbers. Our next unit will  focus on representing numbers  up to 1000 in a variety of ways. we will be learning about using standard form, written form, and expanded form to  represent numbers, as well as using base ten blocks and other methods. One area that is challenging for students when demonstrating their understanding of place value, is being able to represent a number such as 183 in a variety of ways. For example students will usually recognize that a number like 183 has a one in hundreds column, an 8 in the tens column and a 3 in the ones column. They often struggle to find another way to show this. For example, this number could also be represented as having 18 in the tens column and 3 in the ones column. This is not the normal way we would  represent the number, however it does help us when we get to adding and subtracting larger numbers so that students can understand the concept of regrouping a little more clearly. Being able to rearrange numbers in this manner is an important skill in understanding numbers deeply. We will be working on this unit for a number of weeks.

The science presentations were excellent! I was really impressed with how well prepared the students were and the quality of their work, not to mention their speaking ability. thank you to everyone for all the hard work that you put in with your children. I took a video of each child and have placed it in their Google Drive for parents to see. it is in their science folder. The filename looks like this: 

Once again thank you for all your support and it was a pleasure seeing everyone yesterday. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime you have questions about your child's progress, I am always available to speak. I will try to send home the assessment folder on a regular basis so that you can see your child's progress as well. If I have concerns I will certainly call you.

I don’t have any pictures for this week, so enjoy the videos! Sorry!

Have a nice weekend,

Chris Pouliot