April 13-17

Good day everyone.  I hope you all had a great weekend. A couple of things to note this week.  We are swimming today, Wednesday and Thursday.  Thursday is our last day of swimming.  The students have done a great job listening, following directions, and getting changed quickly following to ensure we arrive back to school for dismissal at the end of the day.

A reminder that Wednesday is popcorn day.  Bring 50 cents and get a bag of popcorn for snack.
This Friday at East elementary we are hosting pool D of the Grade 5-6 floor hockey tournament.  The Eagles play their first game at 4pm in the gym.  There will be a concession put on by EEPA, with funds being returned back into East Elementary Programs.  If you have children or siblings playing come out and cheer them on.

One last important reminder, our class pictures will take place next Monday, April 20th.

Language Arts

Spelling:

This week our spelling words continued to work on adding endings.  This week all the words are "short" vowel words that you have to double the last consonant before you add the ending.  For example, map would become mapping.  The exception to this rule is a word ending in x.  You do not double the x.  The spelling words for this week are as follows;

jogging   running   trimming   skipping   shopped   sadder   gladdest   hopped   winning   mixed


Writing:

We continue to look at informative/expository writing versus narrative writing.  We have been comparing strong paragraphs of writing to weak paragraphs.  The students are really starting to grasp the kind of detail required to capture and captivate the reader.  Identifying why a paragraph is strong or weak is very important to being able to write yourself.


Math

The last few weeks we have had a strong focus on 2 digit addition.  Mastering basic math facts (1 digit addition like 8+6) is a great skill and the foundation for 2 digit addition.  The students have been learning many different strategies for doing 2 digit addition.  They have been using hundreds charts (counting by tens and counting by ones), using base 10 blocks, using snap cubes, and we have just started doing vertical addition.  In vertical addition we like to begin with adding the ones together, then add the 10's together. The ones are red, the tens are green.  In the end, this will probably be the easiest and quickest strategy, especially when they eventually get up to 3 digit addition and higher.

   32
+ 46
   78

We will continue with addition and later on subtraction of numbers to 100, into May.


I hope everyone has a great week and weekend ahead.

Mr. Aasen