Aaaannndddd we're back!

A busy week as we got back into the groove. In math, we picked up where we left off, practicing adding and subtracting. We focused on subtracting, especially looking at regrouping/borrowing across zero. I think we'll need some more practice on this as we keep going forward. We'll be starting multiplication next week, as well. As always, we continue to do activities that help us build our number sense, as well as learn the algorithms and more "traditional" math elements.

As I've mentioned before, we like to go to this site: estimation180. It's a great site for building students' skills in estimating. Of course, it's also a great way to get a sense of student number sense. As an example, we looked at the following picture and I had the students share some strategies for estimating the quantity of candy corn, as well as some of their guesses. Their guesses for the bag ranged from 30, 40, 60, 300, up to 1000. As you can see from the guesses of 30, 40 and such, concepts of number and quantity are still developing.

The answer was 893. Some students got fairly close. One student remembered our previous challenge with almonds, thought they were about the same size, and guessed a similar number to the almonds. He was not too far off.

In science we continued with rocks and minerals, beginning an examination of the rock cycle.

We also worked on a small research project on the great horned owl. We did so because we will be having a great horned owl visit our class on Monday. We are all super excited for this. For not only will be get to see the owl, we will also be dissecting sterilized owl pellets to learn more about what owls eat and their role in the ecosystem. This is a part of our ongoing study of plant and animal life-cycles. I'll be sure to get some good pictures and video of the visit for next week.

In literacy, we talked about the Program of Studies for literacy, examining the different things we are supposed to be learning. We did this as part of our approach to our Rats of NIMH project, wherein we will be comparing and contrasting the novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH with the film version, The Secret of NIMH. We will use our discussions to create a rubric (grading plan) for our project, as well as to decide what would be acceptable for showing our learning.

Have a great weekend!