Who Doesn't Love to Learn?

Here's one of the ways that the students have been practising their new skill of subtracting two digit numbers.

Each student had a bag of dominoes, and to create their subtraction equation,

they took out two dominoes, recognized which two digit numeral was larger and wrote their equations onto their own whiteboard.

The students were encouraged to talk outloud as they went through the steps.  The step that most students are still having some difficulty is recognizing that you cannot do 0-2.  Some of the students will say 0-2=2 instead of 0-2 means I need to regroup.

Curious George is the main character in the books that will lead our language learning.  We are focusing on answering questions in complete sentences, finding answers within the text, and recognizing the elements of a story.

The students are also continuing their work on becoming better authors, so the focus this month is on finding interesting ways to start and end a story.

The students got a chance to practise drawing this cute monkey through directed drawing lessons.

They transferred their work onto a smaller piece of watercolour paper, outlined their drawing with a sharpie pen,

and then used watercolours to complete the picture.

The watercolour paper is taped in place until it dries.  This prevents the paper from curling.

You can see all the great monkey portraits on the bulletin board picture above.

Look what one little smartie was able to do.  I think we were talking about how we were going to have to make groups of students because I only had 7 copies of the book we were going to read.  This cutie said "I know what to do.  There are 21 students here and we have 7 books.  We need to put the kids in groups of 3."  I then showed the other students how to write this mathematical thinking in an equation.  They thought it was so cool!

I think they are so smart!