August 18th, 2016

Dear Parents,

Can you believe it is almost Friday? This week has gone so fast for us. We began our morning with unit. In unit we looked at how colors can represent different ideas and emotions. For example – yellow could mean bright, happy,  or ecstatic. It was great to see that the children had different perspectives on the meaning of color. Whilst some students saw the color red as love, others saw red as anger. We then looked at a symbol I had created. The students didn’t know its secret meaning, so their task was to interpret what they believed the symbol represented. As a group they began recreating the symbol, picking special colors to help portray its message. Tomorrow we will continue with this. Students will get to see how each other interpreted the symbol, and find out the reasons why I created it.

Next we had math class. Students worked independently on a place value game. They had to roll a number with a dice (sometimes twice), draw the correct representation, and then expand the number. They really enjoyed this task, and are demonstrating great understanding of  place value. Tomorrow we will look at -10 and +10 as well as -100 and +100.

To end the day we had Daily Five. Students are demonstrating good read to self skills, and have built stamina of 6 minutes. The skills we learnt today were for ‘extending vocabulary’ and for ‘comprehension’. Students really enjoyed finding interesting words.

Extending vocabulary – tune into interesting words and use them in speaking and writing

Comprehension – back up and reread. Sometimes a useful skill for comprehension is to reread a sentence. Once we have read the sentence twice, we can 'check for understanding'. 

Questions you could ask your child:

- Did you find any interesting words in your book/books today?

- Tell me about the symbolism of red? What does red mean?

- How many ones are in 58?