February 11, 2019

Hello Families,

Despite the extremely cold temperatures, things are going great in our classroom. Last week, Mrs. Jemmott was able to continue a lot of the work we have been doing with numbers and students were working with venn diagrams to classify numbers using vocabulary such as even, odd, greater than and less than.

Today we took some time to build on foundational understandings of even and odd, as these seem to be tricky ideas when we work into two digit numbers. We created hundreds charts as a tool to identify the pattern in even and odd, and worked with materials to build and deconstruct numbers to break them into even or near even groupings to determine "Even Steven" or "Odd Todd". Here's the 100's chart we did together, ask your child some questions about even and odd numbers and "how do you know its even/odd?" to see their understanding!

Here's our color coded chart, blue for odd numbers and red for even.

Additionally, we have our awesome, custom made books from our big buddies at Nickle school! To thank them for all of their hard work we wrote rough and good copy cards for them that will be sent over to them. We are doing some work with the books at school and soon they will be sent home as they are yours to keep.

Our good copy letters are all ready to be sent off to our pen pals at Fuji Kindergarten, Tokyo, Japan as well. This week we will write a whole class letter to compare and contrast our lives to what we have already learned about life in Japan and then our letters will be ready for mailing! In learning about Japan we have had so many extraordinary experiences, for example, we got to make and taste mochi (a traditional Japanese rice treat), use chopsticks, learn about the landforms, and practice origami, all while keeping track of our learning in our Japan scrapbooks. Each student learned the Japanese art of origami and folded their own carpe fish, all of which are currently hanging from the roof in our classroom, they look really cute!

Tomorrow we finish up our Design Thinking STEM challenge where we are designing a device to retrieve keys from a sewer to help our friend Marta (a fictional text character). Students have worked hard about reiterating their design and considering what they already know about magnets to guide their work. 

Our gymnastics unit is now over, so please feel free to have more flexibility in the dress code again. Additionally, if you have not already done so please return your white report card envelope to school (leave the report at home) with a signature as they are used for the June report cards as well. 

Also a reminder that all Scholastic orders are due on Wednesday, Feb. 13 and there is a free book offer this month, see my previous Scholastic post for details. 

Take care!

Lindsay Brown