Buddy PJ Day tomorrow!

Hello all!

I was away yesterday!  Tomorrow is a buddy day and we decided we would all wear our PJ's and Santa hats, or winter hats, or winter sweaters to work on a buddy gingerbread people project together.

On that note, we are invited to wear seasonal sweaters between now and the holidays, but we aware of clothing choices for roller blading next week on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - for example girls should not wear skirts or dresses those days and remember that heads will need helmets (your own if you wish, but they will be provided if needed).  That means no headbands or fancy barrettes those days.

We are doing a new number game with greater than and less than today.  Pull from a brown bag of two colour choices - record the two colours you have in your bag, then sort and count the "handful" you drew without looking.  record < or > between your two numbers to show more and less, or greater than and less than.  This can be expanded to also add or subtract the two numbers as we move on with this learning.

We did mental math today based on our own classroom numbers, talking about subtracting as minus which is counting backward on a number line, and adding, plus, as going forward on the number line.  One of our goals is to be able to do 1 or 2 more, 1 or 2 less than all the numbers up to 20 without needed our fingers or a number line by the end of June.  The goal is that by then we know our number sequence forward and backward between 1 and 20 so well, that these numbers 1 or 2 more and 1 or 2 less, become automatic "mental math".  That way the mental math becomes a strategy for higher addition and subtraction. 

We continued with our own writing ideas today, using phonetic sound knowledge.  Yesterday, writing was a story response to, "Snack Attack".  I might be able to tell you about that funny story!

Yesterday we also did a story math response to show about number representation in our own lives, based on the story, "Lifetime - the amazing numbers in animal lives" . Later in the year, we will do an actual animal connection to this story and some information inside.  For this math activity, we focused on any way that numbers show up in our own lives and connected to a picture idea similar to the ones we did for "10 Black Dots" earlier this year.