Welcome Canadian Friends

We are lucky to have two students from the University of Regina following our blog again. We are glad to share our ideas. They are Christina and Cassie. We recently found out that the city they live in has fewer people than our school. Wow! We hope they will go back in our blog by clicking the word video to see the movie we made earlier in the year.

It is a crazy time of year for us. The year is quickly coming to a close. We are mostly completing our writing folders, doing last minute running records, reviewing our math standards and learning new games we will see again in 1st grade. On Monday we have our last awards ceremony and field day.

Teacher Appreciation Week

Wow! What a great week we had last week. It all started last Monday when students brought in beautiful flowers enough to fill 5 vases. Our room smelled wonderful and it added such a brightness to everything. The next day, the students brought in "Promises" of things they were going to try to do. Wednesday came and the students brought in books from their homes or new books for our classroom. It was funny learning why each student chose their book. Thursday it was fun to receive gift cards and pamper items. We will have fun and smell good at the same time. It all ended on Monday, when we had a pizza party. We also received a photo book filled with different pictures of events we had this year. It will be something we will always cherish. Thank you to everyone who made us feel special.

How Many Could I Have?

This week we are working on word problems that have more than one answer. Today the students were given this problem to solve:
I have 5 crayons.
Some of them are red and some of them are blue.
How many of each could I have?

A few students right away wrote down the answer 10, thinking they had both 5 red crayons and 5 blue crayons. Some of the students looked a little blank in the face. While others started drawing 5 crayons, coloring some of the them red and some blue. It was fasinating to see their stratgies. It was also amazing the different recording strategies they used to show their answers.

Give your child a similar problem at home to see how they solve the problem. Encourage them to find more than one answer. With the help of their classmate Bryce, the class also discover how to tell when they have found all the combinations. Look under one heading either the red crayons or the blue crayons. Check to see if you have used each number. For the above problem, they looked to see if they used 1,2,3 and 4. We also talked about why the combination of 0 and 5 does not work in this problem. If your not sure why, it is because the problem states I have some of each color.

Teacher of the Year and Employee of the Year

Last week we had a celebration breakfast for Mrs. Cothern and Grandma Ellis. It was a fun morning with the teachers performing skits in honor of them. That night we also attended the Eddy Awards which is where they pick the Duval County Teacher of the Year. We had a great time having dinner with 20 other teachers from Chets and 300 teachers from the county.