Parent Information Session

Hi all,

I have just updated the parent information page of the blog for those that are about to start school.  Please go here to see the information that was shared at the info session last week and to access the slides!

Math City

This week we have been exploring number sense by creating a Math City!

Number Sense can be defined as:
· knowing numbers relative values 
· how to use them in flexible ways when adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing
· how to develop useful strategies when counting, measuring or estimating.

It has been a lot of fun being immersed in maths and seeing the maths around us.  The class has been building towers for 10th Street (where all the houses 0-10 live) Teen Street and 20th Street (where all the houses 20-29 live).  They have been building and counting the towers.  

We also sat down as architects and city planners and drew our own Maths City Skylines.  We had to create our buildings and count how many squares were in each building.  We explored the idea of area with this and continued counting and building our number sense.  Seeing that a 12 tower could be 12 tall or 2 columns of 6 helps us to be flexible with our numbers. Have a look at some of our cities!

The excitement is too much to contain!

Teddy Bear's Picnic Continued

Last week our Teddy Bear Picnic inspired learning sparked so much excitement and interest that we have more of that learning to share with you!

Literacy

We read stories about bears during reading time and we wrote about teddies! Look at some of our amazing writing!

We read this story:

Which is all about what our teddies actually do when we're not looking and then we wrote our own versions about what we think our teddies do when we are at school.

We thought about what we needed on a picnic and we had to stretch the sounds of the words and use the stamps to write them.  This is what we call stretchy snake and it is a strategy we learn in reading and writing.

Poetry and Movement: All week we learned this poem Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear and we acted it out with our own teddies!

Numeracy
There were so many ways we linked Teddy Bears' Picnic to maths it was incredible!

Introducing Fractions: We introduced the fraction 1/2 by decorating a picnic mat and thinking about each half having a different pattern. 

Sorting, counting and graphing: We sorted and graphed our teddies by size.  This exercise was really interesting because it caused some confusion around the difference between size and quantity.  Many of us got confused about which teddy we had the least amount of because the 1 was so big!

We also got to sort, count and graph these gummy bears and then we got to eat them too! They were delicious!

Story problems with math buddies: We had a story problem of bears coming over the hill to the Teddy Bears' Picnic and we had to figure out and explain how we figured out how we knew how many teddies were coming to the picnic. 

Some of the ways we explained our thinking was that we knew 5 + 5 =10, so 1 less would make it 9.  Some of us explained that we knew a whole 10 and some more was a teen and others knew 5 + 5 =10 plus 3 more makes 13. 

 

Art and Making: We made our own teddy puppets and we used playdough to make teddy food for the picnic!

Celebrating: At the end of the week we had a family and teddy picnic on top grass.  It was lovely to end our week of ted-tastic exploration and learning with some lovely afternoon tea with our friends, teds and whanau!

Thanks for those who could make it!