Tuesday, February 28, 2012

After snack and quiet reading, we did some work today on some phonemic awareness.  This is the "...ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes--in spoken words" (http://www.begintoread.com/articles/phonemic-awareness.html). 

As I familiarize myself, and the class, with some lessons from the SMARTBoard website, I can see how they can be very useful in engaging the class.  Here is an example of some work we did when we were looking at the ch sound.

Tomorrow I will select another sound that we will look at.  While not all members of the class has challenges with breaking down words, I found it to be a useful exercise.



The work on subtraction continued today.  I shared with the class the approach to solving the problem from yesterday's class:

I downloaded some lessons on subtraction but did not have a chance to get to them.  We will look at them tomorrow.

I think I made the video of Jack and Stavroula (mostly Jack explaining) smaller so it will fit on the blog.  Along with Sandro and George, they correctly explained how to solve the problem to the left using the Base 10 material.  It was interesting that Jack used the idea of cancelling out cubes (eliminating them or subtracting them).  We will continue our work on subtracting, I suspect, for another couple of weeks before we explore another topic or strand. Here is the video.

In the afternoon we talked a little more about the narrative paragraph we are working on and what a narrative paragraph does.  Again, I used a video from the SMARTBoard website to assist us.  I meant to take a photo of the main screen but did not.  I will do so tomorrow when we resume talking about this.

While the Band students were out, the remaining students completed the online surveys for the Strength Based Resilience project.  Once all of the surveys begin, we will begin working this into a big portion of the Second Term work.  The students will take a survey now, take part in the program, and then do a survey afterwards to see if they have had any change in attitude or perspective.

Homework:  Only page 28 of Math