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7 Weeks of Positive Habits

Our morning message today challenged us to think back over the past 7 weeks. We've been developing some new, positive habits, and we reflected on that. "I am completing my Learning Habits," "I'm taking mindful breaths before I act," "I'm not rushing and going back to check to make sure my work is complete," were just a few comments. SO exciting!

In reading, our journey with Red has brought us to the point where we are able to identify the STRUGGLE Red has, and how each event, or problem, ties into it. MAN! Good stuff. It really helps bring the whole book together, especially now that we are moving into learning how to summarize text in our own words. We will find that we don't have to retell everything...it all fits together as a whole. We are expanding the depth of exploring specific quotes and seeing the power when we pause and think.

In writing, we are beginning a new descriptive technique called "Come To..." which has us using our senses to describe. We create a poem from there, which then is a great springboard for a narrative piece with detail. In word work, we wrapped up our week with the theme of curiosity and are moving into insuring that our proper nouns are capitalized...in ALL our work. It's important, and a new habit for some of us, to go dig back into our work and make sure we are using/spelling these pattern words correctly. It's also new to be using them outside of the structured word work activities. Once we see how amazing our new vocabulary sounds in our work, we can't stop!

In math, we're building our subtraction muscles. Through number talks and PODs (problems of the day), we're creating a variety of strategies to subtract multidigit numbers. Some of our favorites include using an open number line to count up or count down. Compatible or "friendly numbers" are so helpful here, and we find ourselves counting by multiples of 10, 100, or 1000 constantly now. We're finding lots of places to connect place value understandings to multidigit subtraction, too, especially when we use a regrouping strategy. Since a subtraction algorithm or regrouping works for any problem, we definitely want to have this place value strategy as one of the tools on our toolbelt. However, regrouping can quickly get pretty complex and we are always mindful to be checking for accuracy. We've found several checks to be helpful; these include using expanded form to check that our regrouping still matches the original value of our "whole" number and checking subtraction with addition (since our addition muscles are still stronger than our subtraction). It's been a week full of number talks in center groups and with the whole class, so our mental math muscles and our number sense are growing. It's like going to the gym, except our brains are making new connections with every rep!

Mr. Crissey visited this week and read us The Dot by Peter Reynolds. It kicks off our first schoolwide value focus, courage. We enjoyed bringing all the schema we have from our discussions and work with courage to the conversation! We each made our mark and created our own dot to add to a Kiker hallway display...coming soon!
Image result for the dot
Have a fantastic weekend!
Jen and Jewellyn


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