January 15th Update

Here are the spelling words for this week:

Reading and Writing

In Literacy this week we are focusing on the reading comprehension strategy of retelling. We are working on only retelling the major events of the story, and leaving out the minor details. The minor details are important as they help the reader visualize, and make the story interesting, but when we include them in our retell it becomes too long. So far we have been reading stories together and separating the major events from the minor details. Later students will work to do this in pairs, and then we will work towards retelling stories independently. 

Math

We are learning about subtraction in math. Similarly to when we were learning about adding numbers we are focusing on mental math strategies. In class we read a story about a child named Carlos. In the story Carlos becomes curious about the ages of his family members when he was born. Students spent time using subtraction strategies to investigate the ages of Carlos' family members. Now they are investigating their own families, which is lots of fun! Yesterday we took a break from our investigations to make number lines using beads. The beads are organized into groups of 5. This is helping to support students in taking leaps of ten when adding and subtracting, rather than counting by ones. 

Below are some of the strategies for subtraction that we are learning about. Many students have moved away from counting backwards by ones to taking leaps of ten and using friendlier numbers. We will continue to practise our strategies for addition and subtraction and we will have a small test in the near future. Stay tuned for information about this.

Social Studies

This week students have been working on their inquiry projects. Each student has generated their own questions related to a topic that they were interested in connected to our learning in social studies. Once questions were generated students spent time using research skills to find their answers. Now many students are working on creating a google slide to share their learning with the class. This is the final project in this unit. 

Science

Our next science units will begin later this month. Grade 2 students will be exploring the properties of liquids and solids. The Grade 3 students will be learning all about strong and stable structures. If you have any special insight, or experience with these topics please contact Mrs. Gibbs!