Learning To Go Mr. Avery's Class on the Web 

Read Across America Day is coming! This annual nationwide event is held the first week of March in honor of local author Dr. Suess’s birthday. School across the country will welcome community readers into classrooms. This Friday morning we’ll be visited by Seth’s mom, Charolette Winder, who will share the joy of reading by reading aloud to our class. Can’t wait!

Our reading focus this week is on Finding the Theme and Author’s Message. A reading theme is a big idea that we encounter again and again in literature, such as bravery or honesty or perseverance. The author’s message, on the other hand, is the moral of the story. We find evidence of it by looking at what the main character(s) learned, usually through failure. In The Gingerbread Man, for example, the theme is boastfulness. It’s a broad idea we find in many books, movies, and songs. The lesson to be learned (author’s message) is Don’t brag about yourself to others. We know this because when he did that, he came to a bad end. In any case, notice how looking at stories this way helps children to think deeply and critically about text, which is a big goal of reading instruction! You can try it at home with your young reader using any fiction story, and of course Aesop’s Fables are a great resource for finding the moral of the story. Here’s a great online collection from the Library of Congress!

The kids have been doing a great job learning to write informative pieces that explain topics to readers. Here are some from 1) Aarika, on Dogs, 2) Cameron, on Baseball, and 3) Jaxson, on Minecraft: 1) One important thing about dogs is their sense of smell. Dogs have 25% better sense of smell than humans. 2) One important thing about baseball is knuckleball. What you do to knuckleball is you put your pinky, ring finger, middle finger, and pointer on the top of the ball and your thumb on the bottom. When you throw the ball you throw it overhand. 3) Another important thing about Minecraft is the things you can build. When you have a block, you build. If you press a button on the bottom left you place down a block and then you can build structures. Awesome!

Our next area of study in math involves understanding and using money. Besides identifying coins/bills and their amounts, students should be able to combine various amounts of both. Consider this example:

Notice how students can best solve this by starting with the larger amounts and using counting on/adding on. Students will also learn to write in dollars-and-cents notation ($1.25) and with words: one dollar twenty five cents. Students will also learn to compare 2 or more amounts of money. This can get tricky if students are still learning coin values and totaling. For example, 7 coins does not make an amount greater than 2 coins if we’re comparing 7 pennies and 2 quarters.

For help with homework, see the resources section of your child’s math homework folder where you will find a variety of pages on everything from coins and counting to vocabulary. If you’re following in the eBook, this is Chapter 11. Although many of us pay for things with cards instead of cash, be on the lookout for opportunities to teach your child to total amounts of coins and bills and to estimate 1) if there is enough to buy something and 2) about how much change is due!

Singing is a great way to memorize new skills! Readeez has put out a truly fantastic collection of learning songs. Here’s one of our favorites in class. You can find others (dimes, nickels, quarters, and much more) at Youtube.com and at the Readeez site.

Here’s some pics of kids doing an amazing job explaining the math in their awesome projects!

This month’s School Meeting centered around the book One, by Kathryn Otoshi. The theme of this book is “being an upstander” instead of a bystander when you see someone being put down or bullied. Students read the book together and brainstormed strategies for helping others and themselves in these tricky situations. We were also treated to a dramatic reading of the text by the Ross and Beall classrooms! You can view the book online here.

Our reading focus this week is on finding the main idea in fiction. It’s important that students learn to identify big ideas in texts and separate them from details. To do this, students will learn to ask: What did the main character do? What did the main character want? What did the main character achieve? The answers to these questions lead the reader to understand what the page, or chapter, or book is about, thus improving their comprehension. You can practice during homework time by guiding your child through these questions during or after reading.

The focus of this week’s math is estimating by rounding up/down and using estimation as a way to check the reasonableness of sums/differences. These are VERY important skills that require students to develop and apply number sense as they think critically about math.

At first, students just need to learn and practice the basic skill of rounding to the nearest 10. Next, to check that a sum/difference is reasonable, they will learn to use estimates. Take this example: When solving 67 + 44, I can estimate the sum as 110 (67 rounds up to 70, plus 44 which rounds down to 40). My actual answer therefore needs to be close to 110 (no more than 10 away from the actual answer). If I get an answer of 111, my estimate shows that my answer is reasonable and I likely have it correct. However if my answer is, say, 121 then I better check my work because that answer is too large to be correct. The beauty of using estimates is that they push kids to think of the numbers involved by rounding them into 10s and 100s, which they can ‘hold in their heads’ much easier than numbers like 67 and 44.

Reminder: Students will exchange valentines this Wednesday. There are students in our classroom.

The kids did a great job researching and teaching others about Olympic symbols such as the torch, oath, and rings. Here’s a snapshot, along with the fourth graders’ presentation at our School Meeting:

  

 

 

100 Day is almost here! Students should plan to create some model of 100 and bring it in any day up to this Friday. They will be sharing their project and the related math to classmates on that day. Reminder: Instead of simply collecting 100 things in a bag, I’m challenging students to think more deeply about number, such as:

• grouping objects (stickers/pennies/etc.)  on a poster that shows counting (and/or multiplying) by 5s, 10s, 2s, etc., with accompanying multiplication or repeated addition sentences
• bar models using the number 100
• create real-world problems with 100

Click here and scroll down for a look at the creative ways that one class took on this challenge. There is also a plethora of projects and ideas on Google and Pinterest and across the web!

Our reading focus this week is on finding the Main Idea in nonfiction. To do this critical thinking, students are taught to read and think about the heading in a text. Then they look for a key sentence–one that contains the most important information in a paragraph. This is where the main idea lies, and it is the information they should remember. Try it with your child using this page (and any other) from the Time for Kids site: Famous Firsts

The kids are doing great work with opinion writing, supporting their reasons with details. Here are excepts from 1) Elly, on why Easter is the best holiday, and 2) Silas, on why Dogs make better pets than cats: 1) For one thing, you can paint Easter eggs with your friends. For example, you can make faces and flowers and animals and lots more. 2) Last, dogs help blind people. Dogs take blind people to stores and to home but cats can’t do it. Super!

This week’s math focuses on relating difference to subtraction, and learning mental math strategies to subtract. Since subtraction is the inverse operation of addition, we make a connection to last week’s strategies. To find the difference when only the ones place changes, we simply subtract and don’t mess with the tens and hundreds: 267 -5 is the same as 7 -5–just remember to put back the 260. To subtract in your head when only the tens place changes, just count back by tens: 267 – 50 should sound like 257, 247, 237, 227, 217. And the same applies when only the 100s place changes: 267 – 100 = 167.

To quickly subtract 7, 8, or 9 in our heads, we can subtract 10 instead and count up 3, 2, or 1. For example: 432 – 7 is the same as 432 – 10 (422) + 3 (425) since -10 +3 = 7. And 432 – 8  is the same as 432 – 10 (422) + 2 (424), and 432 – 9 is the same as 432 – 10 + 1.  These tricks can really work, and show a real fluency with numbers. It is important, therefore, that students try them out repeatedly if they are ever to own them or use them when it suits them to do so.

Reminder:

Valentine’s Day is coming! We will exchange valentines in class on Wednesday, 2/14. If your child brings valentines in for classmates, please be sure there is one for everyone. There are currently 23 students in our class. Refer to our class list sent home if your child wishes to personalize valentines with names. Of course, hand-made ones are welcome as well as store-bought! Please be sure no food (including candy) is attached per our district policy, and thanks!