Division 10 has been practicing to read well with a partner. After the holiday break, we’ve needed to review basic rules such as sitting next each other or choosing one book to read together.
During these sessions, students practice important life skills like turn-taking, listening, making compromises, encouraging others, and even teaching.
Maia demonstrates flexible number sense by considering different ways to get a sum of 14. She can show her math thinking symbolically using drawings and equations. Students are learning that they need to be precise in math, whether in properly printing digits or including symbols. Sometimes, students forget to include the ‘plus’ or ‘equal’ sign, so we’re trying to review our work too!
In Term 2, we continue to develop our number sense with a strong focus on addition up to 100.
Our math learning takes form in different ways – worksheets, open-ended morning questions, picture books, games, drills (Chrono Maths), and number routines.
One such number routine is the ‘problem of the day’. This week, students have been reflecting on their addition strategies.
We’ve been using Carole Fullerton’s Good Questions: A Year of Open-Ended Math Problems for Grades 2-4 for daily discussion.
Open-ended questions are low-risk and inclusive to all learners. They invite multiple solutions and rich discussion. The class understands that so long as the answer ‘makes sense’ (ie. is logical), it is up for group consideration.
Students practice both creative and critical thinking skills during this activity, helping make math more dynamic. They also develop their communication skills as they might be asked to share their math thinking in different ways – symbolically, concretely, and/or verbally.
Open-ended questions include more students in the act of problem-solving. The more often we expose students to these key math ideas the more fluent they become; the more we recognize and celebrate different problem-solving approaches, the smarter the collective becomes. (Fullerton)
As the school year progresses, we’ll continue to build on this and other number routines.
Students practiced some metacognition today. We discussed the various core competencies that we use at school every day: communication, thinking (creative and critical), personal and social responsibility.
From the Ministry of Education website:
The Core Competencies are sets of intellectual, personal, and social and emotional proficiencies that all students need in order to engage in deep, lifelong learning.
Students worked in groups, studying photos taken since September. In making our learning visible, we realized just how much we do at school!
We’ve started exploring base 10 materials this week. We’re exploring this Big Idea from the Grade 2 curriculum: “Numbers to 100 represent quantities that can be decomposed into 10s and 1s.”
We’re learning this content regarding place value:
understanding of 10s and 1s
understanding the relationship between digit places and their value, to 99 (e.g., the digit 4 in 49 has the value of 40)
decomposing two-digit numbers into 10s and 1s
As seen in the photo above, students had fun exploring even bigger numbers. They noted how the number 10 is important in each unit, ex. 10 ones make one ten, 10 tens make one hundred, etc.
We’ve been learning relevant math vocabulary such as une unité (a one), une dizaine (a ten), une centaine (a hundred), or valeur de position (place value).
Students have been learning about Canadian regions. We’re now starting to learn more about animals that live in our region, l’Ouest canadien.
