Week 17 January 6

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Posted by kavery508 | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on January 6, 2020

2019-08-23_23-14-20_ILCE-6500_DSC02068_DxOCreative Commons License Miguel Discart via Compfight

Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were full of cheer and good memories to cherish. I got to catch up with family and friends and recharge! Onward…

Community Reader Day is coming! On Friday, March 6 at 9:30, Floral will be filled with Shrewsbury residents who will read to students and share how reading is a joyful and impactful part of their lives. Before I tap into our pool of volunteers to obtain a reader, I want to put it out to our class parents first. If you would like to come in to read and talk to our class, and possibly lead an activity (we can talk), please let me know this week!

Our CAFE focus this week is on Inferring, which is a strategy we use all the time to help us understand what we’re reading. When we infer, we use our schema (what we already know about something) and combine it with clues from the text to understand something new. Consider these lines from Eloise Greenfield’s poem Things: Went to the beach/Played on the shore/Built me a sandhouse/Ain’t got it no more. My schema tells me that at the beach we build sandcastles, which is what she likely means, and sometimes the ocean comes and washes them away–that’s why the speaker “Ain’t got it no more.” Kids and grownups infer all the time in real life, for example: Snow is in the forecast. When the phone rings at 5:30 AM we can infer school will be delayed or cancelled! It’s smart to catch it when it happens and ask “How did you infer that? What were your clues?” Here is a site that, while designed for teachers, has lots of great info and links on inference: http://www.minds-in-bloom.com/2012/02/tips-for-teaching-inference.html

Chapter 6 of MIF focuses on learning multiplication facts of 2s, 5s, and 10s by teaching the connection between skip-counting and multiplication, and using that understanding to solve problems. To solve 8 x 2, for example, we want students to count by 2 eight times. It is a way of learning the meaning behind the numbers involved in multiplication instead of just memorizing facts (which has value, too, just not on its own). One way we teach this is to have students count pairs of objects. Next is counting on fingers while counting aloud by 2 (1 finger up gives you 2, or 1 x 2; etc.). Students will then be introduced to dot paper, which for this chapter shows arrays of 2s, 5s, or 10s. The example below shows 4 x 2. On homework, students should use dot paper by counting down the rows by 2s, then naming how many rows they counted. In this example, they should say “2, 4, 6, 8; I counted 4 times; 4 times 2 is 8.”

dot paper2

To help us use skip counting to multiply, we’ll be using some chestnuts from Schoolhouse Rock–remember those? <“)

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