This is an easy game to replicate at home to give your child practice counting pennies and reading dot patterns on dice. You must roll an exact number to take the remaining coins in the "bank." Player with the most pennies wins! Then it's time to play again.
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I asked the children to talk with someone at home about their Hopes & Dreams in 1st Grade. We made a list of ideas in school today. Tomorrow they will write about their hopes & dreams or "wishes" for 1st Grade.
We have been working on identifying the main idea and key details in nonfiction text. At first glance it seems pretty straight-forward; but if you dig a little deeper, the concept can be fairly complex. Below is a video message addressing this as well as our continued work on a Social Contract. Each week your child will get a new book and a card outlining what they need to do each night with their book. There are things to focus on each night with their reading group book in addition to reading it. Help your child keep track of their reading minutes on the monthly Book It calendar too! And don't forget you can count reading minutes from your Baggie Book, library books and Razzkids onlline reading. Day 1 Vocabulary Review & practice reading the vocabulary words listed on the back of their card, locate them within the text, and discuss the meaning of the words. Day 2 High Frequency Words & Decoding Strategy Review & practice the decoding strategy written on the front of their card (when appropriate). Hunt for High Frequency Words in the text and color them on the sheet provided- one side of the sheet has Kindergarten & 1st Grade words; the other side has the 2nd Grade words. Don't forget to practice the High Frequency Word list that your child should keep in their bag daily. Parent volunteers check them periodically throughout the week. Day 3 Reading Standard Review & practice the standard written on the front of their card as it applies to the text. Discuss the text with your child and encourage thoughtful responses that are grounded in evidence from the text. They need to demonstrate good understanding of the text. Day 4 Fluency & Reading Standard Review the Fluency Rubric and practice reading smoothly, with few errors and strong comprehension. Last week I attended a three day conference called Capturing Kids' Hearts. It was inspiring and affirming because it spoke to my heart about school & classroom culture and rapport with students to establish a positive and effective learning environment. One of the first things we are going to do is create a Social Contract. With young children this process will take about a week as we explore four questions and record our thoughts. The first question is: How do you want to be treated by me? Talk about it with your child. On Monday we will begin recording our Social Contract. Today Stellar participated in Volunteers from Century Link taught students about Citizenship, Government, and Economics. Our class had the pleasure of learning from manager, Travis Bowie. Ask your child to tell you about their experience with Junior Achievement. We will reread our books for homework tonight and study our new spelling words. Our project has been re-posted to Donor's Choose and thanks to strong support we are quickly getting closer to funding this project in full.
Through April 4, 2014 donors can enter the promo code INSPIRE during checkout to have their contribution matched (up to $100). see video below FYI- If you would like to have the discretion to give your entire donation to our project, you must change the 15% default "optional" donation to Donor's Choose to 0%. Also, using a mobile device seems to omit this ability to opt out. In that case, you may need to use a computer to access their full site. We are working hard for Celebrate Our Stars night which will be on Wednesday, May 7. Technology integration is a big part of our project. We are getting excited to share this with you! We are beginning to add 2-digit numbers. In school we approach this a bit differently than most of us remember. When I was in school (like many of you) I learned to write the equations vertically and begin adding in the one's place, carrying the one anytime the answer was bigger than 9. Basically this method is a great written strategy or algorithm. If you've ever tried to "carry the one" in your head, it can be challenging, especially as the numbers get bigger. There are just so many parts and pieces to keep straight. Most adults have adopted other strategies for computing big numbers mentally. Sometimes I add the tens first, then the ones and finish by adding the tens and ones together. Other times I adjust one of the numbers to make it easier to do mentally and make a change at the end to compensate for that adjustment. And finally, there are times when I simply start with the bigger number and skip count up, first by 10s and then by 1s. What's more interesting is that children who have not been introduced to any particular method naturally discover these strategies on their own. In the long run these methods promote the understanding of number and the mental capacity to compute large numbers in our heads. We are also using estimation to consider the reasonability of our answer. Estimation is a great way to check our work to see if it is close. Below is a video modeling and explaining these strategies. We continue to explore strategies to help us know our basic facts to 20. 2nd graders develop automaticity of these facts through frequent practice and explicit instruction of mental strategies. They should be able to recognize the answer within 3 seconds. We call this "Fact POWER!" Today we focused on fact families. We used fact triangles as flash cards to reinforce the idea of fact families. The more they use the fact triangles, the more familiar they become with the fact families. Then when they encounter a fact with 2 of the numbers they will quickly identify the missing number rather than having to calculate the answer. When they know 5, 7, 12 are a fact family they will know... 5+7= 12-5= 7+5= 12-7= For homework the children are bringing home a set of fact triangles. Have them cut them out and put them in a baggie and keep them in a safe spot. Pull them out frequently to practice for a minute or two. If you keep them handy, you can work on building "Fact POWER" a little bit every day. Below is a video of children practicing with fact triangles in class. Please, Please, Please do not introduce the strategy we all learned in school at this time. It's called
"carry the one." It is important for the children to understand the value of the digits in order to take numbers apart and regroup them during computation. Strong number sense through place value strengthens the ability to mentally compute numbers over the long term and therefore, be less dependent on paper and pencil strategies. Please see the video demonstrating the 3 strategies we have been practicing. We will begin to focus more heavily on the grouping strategy (also called "partial sums"). Don't forget to check the reasonability of your work with a "ballpark" estimate (like our rounding). Thank you for ALL you do to support your child at home! |