Dear families,

All week, we have focussed on kindness. Well, we have talked about kindness often since the beginning of the year. On Valentine’s day, we shared our friendship fruit salad. Thank you to all of the families who generously contributed fruit. There was a lot of fruit (two large mixing bowls) but surprisingly, we finished just about all of it! The kids thought it was delicious. 

We read a story about how to handle teasing and put-downs called Simon’s Hook. It is about a boy who was teased about a bad haircut by some friends. Then he runs into Grandma Rose who compares teasing to fishing hooks and tells him a story about how fish learn not to bite, which is an analogy to not reacting to teasing and he learns some strategies on how to deal with teasing and put-downs. 

We also read Have You Filled a Bucket Today? It’s a story that encourages kindness by using the idea that we fill other’s buckets when we do or say kind things. We learned that it could be the little things we do that either fills or empties someone’s imaginary bucket. When my kids were younger, I would use this language at home about filling and emptying people’s buckets. Sometimes it really helped them understand that their actions and words had both a positive and negative effect on others. Give it a try at home!

In Math, we continued to review our “new way” of adding. This is called decomposing using friendly numbers where we take one of the addends to make it a friendly number like 10, 20, 30, etc. to help us mentally add more efficiently. 

We are becoming more fluent in our addition of numbers to 20. Knowing our doubles is an important one: 2+2=4, 5+5=10, 7+7=14, etc. So, when you become fluent with all of your doubles, this new strategy will help:

2+4=6  If you can see that the one number between 2 and 4 is 3, then simply double the middle number (3) to find the sum. Here is another example: 6+8=14   The middle number is 7. Double the 7 and your sum is 14.

If your child is having trouble remembering their doubles, pull out a deck of cards from A to 10. Randomly flip over the cards and have your child call out the number doubled. 

All students brought home their report cards last Friday. I reviewed it with each student and discussed in detail the proficiency scale along with their strengths and next steps. They all appeared to be happy about their report cards. Please sign the envelope and have your child return it tomorrow or at least by the end of the week. Thank you.

We start our day tomorrow skating at Burnaby Lake Arena. Please arrive to school on time. Bring necessary items to school. Grade 3’s, please bring your booster seat too. Thank you so much to all of our parent volunteer drivers!