Tuesday October 19, 2010

Happy Hero Day! Tomorrow is "wear your exercise clothes" day.

The students helped Mrs. Abbey retell the story, Simon and Molly Plus Hester, using retelling cards with pictures from throughout the story. We talked about beginning, middle, and end. When reading books at home, see if your child can identify these things:
*Who are the characters?
*What is the setting (where does the story take place)?
*Is the story fiction (made-up) or non-fiction (real)?
*What happened at the beginning? the middle? the end?
These are all things we have been focusing on at school this month.

In PE, the 4th grade students helped our kindergarten class with the haunted house obstacle course. It sounds like they had a lot of fun!

We worked as a large group practicing story problems. Mrs. Abbey created many kinds of story problems for the students to figure out. You can do the same thing at home with your child! Just gather together some small manipulatives, such as 10-20 buttons, legos, or other little toys. Then make up a simple story problem for your child to work on!

Here's an example: "Anita went outside to look at the stars. She saw 4 stars in the sky. (child puts down 4 manipulatives). Anita looked a little longer and saw 3 more stars (child puts down 3 more manipulatives). How many stars did Anita see? (child counts up all manipulatives to get the correct answer)

The students enjoyed doing this math activity. Some students wanted to create their own story problems, which would be a wonderful thing to do at home together! Write down some of the story problems your child thinks up at home and send them to school. Mrs. Abbey will use those examples next time we work on story problems together!

Tomorrow, a visitor is coming to talk with the kindergarten students about spiders! If your child has any spider books or plastic spiders that they would like to share with the class, please send them to school tomorrow!