Dear Parents,
Spirit Week has been really fun. My favorite was Wacky Wednesday. We ended the day with recess at Garibaldi Park, and several second graders commented that our neighbors must think we’re crazy!
It is hard to believe that the year is almost over! The students have been a bit taken aback. “Wait, teacher, this is our last harp class?” We have some fun things planned in the last days to wrap up the year, including the heavily anticipated Gnome Party. Ms. Dallman has assured us that everyone will finish knitting their gnomes and that a fabulous tea party celebration will be had next week. I’m looking forward to it.
UPCOMING EVENTS
- No School Friday, May 26 – Records Day
- No School Monday, May 29 – Memorial Day
- Library Book Return – Wednesday, May 31
- Last Day of School, Wednesday, June 7 – 12:00 noon pick-up
CLASSROOM HIGHLIGHTS
Our last block of the year has been a short math review block. We’ll continue with this for the first couple days of next week before moving into review of the entire year. This past week we’ve focused on mental math through story problems. Here is an example. There is a gnome that lives under a lilac bush. In the evening he comes out and he count that there are 1, 563 lilac blooms on the bush. He gives 20 away to his neighbor. How many are left on the bush? This is all done mentally. At times we do “slate board math” where they have a small chalkboard to write their answer on, but the only number that can be written is the answer, so the problem-solving is still mental. Once we do a set of problems, we go back and discuss how different students were able to arrive at the answer, sharing strategies.
We were also able to do some great estimation surrounding Jumpathon. Estimation is a great tool to build math thinking and number sense. You can estimate all kinds of things, like how many steps it will take to get from here to there or how many cookies will fit on the try. I encourage you to add some estimation into your home lives.
If you took any pictures at May Faire or on our Camping Trip, please add them to our shutterfly site.