Mental Math

Merry Christmas to our Orthodox friends!

After a math warm up with the digits 2, 7, and 6 we put our mental math skills to work.  Questions like: "How much bigger is 6 than 4?" and "If I have a nickel in one pocket and 6 cents in the other is the sum greater than or less than a dime?" are completed on white boards so students can share their thinking with me and quickly change answers should they need to.  We do mental math activities two or three times a week.  We then finished up our New Years math pictures.

We are working on determining the lesson of the story and knowing what the author is trying to teach us this week.  We started with a cute little video, Carrot Crazy to talk about what the characters were doing and then we read, 'Alexander Who Used to Be Rich Last Week.'  We will use this anchor book all week to look at lessons taught and pronouns in our writing.

Mindfulness is our new goal this month and this afternoon we completed some breathing activities and talked about using breathing as a tool for decreasing anxiety.

We all have new books from the library - read 20/10.