It's cold!
Birthday Twins!
Mathematics.
We had our final assessment on Friday and there was one question in particular that stood out as tricky. It involved algebra (at grade 1!) to find out what 'y' is:
12 - x = 8
y - x = 7
So to answer this, the students had to find out what 'x' is in the beginning. We drew a number bond and found we could do 12 - 8 to find the answer, which was 4. We then plugged this number into the last number sentence.
y - 4 = 7
We had one more step where we drew another number bond and found that we could add 4 + 7 to find the answer!
4 + 7 = y = 11!
That was nasty! The students all did very well at showing their working out throughout the test and should be commended on their efforts.
Writing.
We also worked on punctuation this week, end marks in particular. We looked at the three different kinds of sentences and which end mark should be used for each one:
Telling sentences: State a fact or inform us of something. They end in a full stop (.)
Question sentences: Ask a question and sometimes use a question word. These end with a question mark (?)
Exclamation sentences: Have a strong emotion in them. These sentences end with an exclamation mark.
nf_report_rubric.pdf |
Reading.
1. Read the key word (stretch it out.)
2. Reread the sentence to help understand what it means.
3. Use the key word in another sentence.
We then looked at finding interesting things to share. The student used different coloured post it notes to find out which parts of their books made them think (ask a question), which parts made them wonder (ask why) or which part made them notice something (a fact.) We then used these notes to read a book on snakes to share interesting parts or try to find out more about a topic. One interesting fact that we learned (and researched!) was the the Western Hook nosed snake farts at predators to make them go away (completely true, the kids made me look it up......)
Social Studies.
Family groups: This can include distant family members but we kept it to immediate family for the time being. We talked about how families can be different sizes and have different members.
School groups: School groups include the whole school, the grade and the classes. It can also include our ECAs.
Community groups: These are groups that other people from outside our school or family can join. The students had the most experience with community groups through classes they take out of school such as ballet and soccer.