Week 2 - We finished our first full week!

Title: We finished our first full week!

Author: Mr. Hodgkinson

Date: September 28, 2020 

Quote of the week: "Decomposition is so much easier for mental math, Mr. H." - MayMay

Song of the Week: - 54-46 Was My Number by Toots & the Maytalls - a protest song from 1968, highlighting police profiling in Jamaica. This was discovered during Spelling Scrabble when we encountered the word "SKA". We also lost Reggae legend "Toots" on September 11, 2020. 

The Best Thing About This Week (The Rose)

The students agreed that getting their two stickers for encouraging their parents to complete the start of the year survey was the highlight. Jazzy pointed out that is was wonderful to get our first week together as a class finished. It has been six months since we've had a full week of school.

The Worst Thing About This Week (The Thorn)

There wasn't much to complain about during this busy week. Some of the students regretted missing the opportunity to gather in a Community Circle on Friday afternoon to share their Appreciation, Apology and Aha Moments. This was because Mr. Hodgkinson had to attend a meeting on Friday afternoon and couldn't make it back to the classroom in time for the final dismissal.

Mathematic Mentions

We continued to work through Jo Boaler's Week of Inspirational Math. We collaboratively completed the Four 4s Activity, finding the numbers from 1 - 20 by using exactly Four 4s. We also discovered patterns using a visual math template intended to access the visual part of the brain. Finally, we looked at some decomposition strategies to make larger numbers more manageable. We keep returning to three mantras from the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) part of our curriculum: 

  • Everyone is a mathematician. 
  • Our brains have neuro-plasticity and struggle makes them grow.
  • It's okay to be where you are, but where are you going today?

Our solution for the Four 4s challenge.

Literacy Links

Literacy this week included a read aloud that took us all by surprise and flummoxed our predictions. The book was called Each Kindness and it launched an art activity using river rocks. More on that later. 

We also learned about first person writing and using both Thinking Stems and the RADaR strategy to improve our quick writes. Final drafts will be finished next week,

What are we looking forward to? (The Bud)

Everyone agreed that we are looking forward to getting access to more tech. The school will be providing our class with a small set of Chromebooks to share and many students are able to bring in a Chromebook or laptop of their own so that we can try some coding and make better use of Google Classroom.

The Arts

We completed some Rock of Kindness Art, using Sharpies to write messages of positivity on river rocks that we collected. Soon, we will decide where we are going to place them to that strangers can find them and enjoy some kindness.

A sample of our Rocks of Kindness

Guest Teacher

When Mr. Hodgkinson was away at his meeting, we had our first guest teacher of the year. Ms. Sestric is a recent Teacher's College graduate and is now working for Thames Valley as an Occasional Teacher. The students made it clear that she did a terrific job and they would like her to return when Mr. Hodgkinson needs to be absent again. 

Quote of the Week










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