Finally a full week of school!

February vacation feels like such a long time ago now that we have had a full week of school!  I hope everyone had a restful and relaxing vacation but I am sure glad we were finally able to have a full week back.  We got right back into the groove of our regular routine and it was great.  

Literacy

Our weekly lessons and word work centers we have been working on the long vowel patterns.  We have studied and played games learning how the magic e works and "vowel teams".  Patterns we have worked with are teams like ee, ea, ai, ay, ie.  These kills are a bit more difficult so it takes a bit more to incorporate into daily reading and writing context.   We continue to review the short vowels as we are learning these new patters.  

Next week is Read Across America week.  This is a great week of celebrating reading with fun activities throughout the week.


Math

We have been working larger numbers in math.  Students are working with place value and understanding how many tens and ones a number has.  We us a base ten block and snap cubes to build numbers and understand the value of the digits.  We also work on regrouping when we have ten ones we can trade that for a ten stick.  

We completed a book about the teen numbers and learned that all teen numbers have one tens and then some ones.  Here are the kiddos competing their teens books:

We also played a concentration game.  Here students had to find the two digit number and then the matching card that had the correct number of base ten block.  

Here students are playing a game where they make a two digit number with our number cards.  They then have to use the base ten blocks to show how many tens and ones the number has.  Playing the games are a great way to make sure they are able to verbalize to their partner what the number represents. 

This a our game of race to 100.  Students roll the dice and add that many cubes to the mat.  Once they have ten in the ones column they trade those in for a ten stick.  This way they learn how to regroup.

We also incorporated the I pads into our math workstations.  While we are working on place value we continue to practice our math facts.  Students are using the Ipads to play a game were they practice their facts.  They love using the Ipads this way and we will be using them more.  During digital learning day I was able to learn new ways to incorporate our I pads into our math.