March Madness!

 Hi Parents and Families! Happy March! First of all, thank you so much to everyone who came to our Family Literacy Night last Monday for our Seuss party! I had so much fun watching everyone engage with these great activities! Any time we make reading and books more fun and share our love of literature, our kids really benefit and their reading grows! 

Math:

In math, we are really focused on addition and subtraction strategies, and how we can use the facts we already know to help us solve harder problems. Seeing how doubles and near doubles work together is a big focus, as well as using addition to figure out subtraction answers. As you talk with your child about math, always be asking how they solved a problem, or how they know the answer. Explaining their thinking really helps to increase number sense and the application of mathematical knowledge, which is, after all, the whole point! 

We've learned a really fun new game called "Salute" that you can play at home with a deck of cards. Just remove all the face cards, shuffle, and find a group of 3 people to play. One person is the dealer, and they pass out a card to each person. When the dealer says go, the other two players hold their card up to their forehead WITHOUT looking at their own card (they should look at the other person's card). The dealer sees both cards, adds them together, and says the sum. Then, the other two players use that info to figure out their own card! Our kids LOVE playing this game and are always really excited to look down at their card and see that they have done the math correctly. Play this at home whenever you can, and for an added challenge play with 4 people instead of 3! 

We are just beginning a new unit that focuses on geometry, spatial awareness, and shapes. So, we're doing lots of hands on activities to give our brains practice at manipulating shapes and space in a certain way. This also goes right along with our new unit on maps in Social Studies! 

Reader's and Writer's Workshop:

Thank you also to all the families who have helped their students research at home! This is a long process, but our kids have really gotten some useful information from books, magazines, the internet, and each other.  We are learning so much about how to find good, useful information, which is really a critical skill in our 21st century world. I love our unit on informational writing because I learn so much! Did you know that vikings kept bears as pets, or that giraffes have blue tongues?

Homework Club:

Our first Homework Club was so much fun! Please help your kids make sure that every bit of homework is turned in on Friday, so they can get in the habit of being responsible for their work outside class. Our next Homework Club will be Friday, March 27th. Kids need to complete ALL their homework in March to eat lunch in our room. 

Stella the Snake! Our class continues to enjoy watching Stella grow, and having a few minutes to interact with her at the end of the day. 

Thanks for reading! Our secret password for this post is SUPERSTAR! Please remind your kiddos to whisper it to me, and not tell anyone else so I can see how many people are reading. :)