Dear families,

What a great way to end the week with bowling at Rev’s for our first field trip of the year with Ms. Santorelli’s and Ms. Tai’s classes! Thank you to all of the parents who helped drive and supervise during our stay. When I looked out to the back of the classroom and saw so many parents standing there, my heart felt instantly grateful.

I appreciated seeing the support, encouragement, and celebrations throughout our time there. So many smiles too!

We are mathematicians.

We worked on solidifying our understanding of place value to develop our number sense. We learned how to expand the numbers into expanded notation. For example, 563 = 500 + 60+3.

Ways to support at home: Check that your child understands the following concepts. Give them random numbers and have them fill in the place value chart, expand the number, and draw the base 10 blocks. Generally, where it gets tricky for students is when there is a zero in the tens or ones place. They need to zero to “hold its place”. Here’s what they need to know:

• 100s, 10s, and 1s
• understand the relationship between digit places and their values (e.g., the digit 4 in 342 has the value of 40 or 4 tens)
• understand the importance of 0 as a place holder (e.g., in the number 408, the zero indicates that there are 0 tens)

Grade 2’s are expected to demonstrate a complete understanding of place value concepts to 100 and grade 3’s to 1000 in order to be considered proficient on the proficiency scale.

We love our Big Buddy time!

On Friday, our big buddies came to our room for a visit! We started by reading together. Then we practiced our math facts with our newly learned random numbers chart.

How to support at home: We are encouraging all children to practice their math facts at home. This is a fantastic way to practice at home! You’ll notice that on the left-hand side, there are digits from 0-9. On the right, there are numbers from 10-19. So far, we practiced the following:

• +1 and -1 which is just counting up or down by one number
• +2 and -2 which is counting by twos up or down. I want to see children trying NOT to add with their fingers for these. Please practice skip counting forwards and backwards so they can become fluent: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 and 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19.
• +10 (only use the left side) and -10 (only use the right side)
• Making 10s (only use the left side) so when you point to 6, they say 4. When you point to 2, they say 8.
• Coming up: Doubles. Get ahead and have your child practice 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 3+3=6, 4+4=8 and all the way through to 9+9=18, 10+10=20

Then we did a paper chain challenge! Students connected with another buddy pair for this challenge. Everyone was given one sheet of paper, scissors, and an arm’s length piece of tape. They were given 20 minutes to come up with the longest chain. We saw great communication, teamwork, and excitement!

Some teams had tape left over so they turned these pieces into more chain links. Way to use your core competencies of critical and creative thinking! So resourceful!

Diwali

Diwali is a “festival of lights”. We read a book and watched a short video on this celebration. Please ask your child what they learned!

Save the Dates

• Monday, December 4: Metro Vancouver Watershed Water Cycle (free in-class presentation)
• Tuesday, December 12: Winter concert at 6:30pm and an afternoon dress rehearsal
• Thursday, December 7: OWLS presentation (paid in-class presentation; look out for more information to come next week)
• February 12 & 26 from 9:30 (1 hour): Ice skating at Bill Copeland (paid field trip; we will need parent volunteers, please. Ice skate rentals are available.)

As always, your children bring me such joy and I am ever so grateful. Thank you for your continued support at home every day. If you can help make sure your child can understand the math concepts, that would be greatly appreciated!

With a heart full of gratitude, Ms. Chan