Time for some spring cleaning! These items have been sitting in our lost and found bins for quite some time. If you see anything that belongs to you, please remind your kiddo to bring it home. Water bottles should come home for a good rinse over the break too.

Our students are challenged with bonus math work if they find themselves with extra time between activities. I love watching them reach for the tools that work for them: connecting cubes, hundreds charts, abaci/counting frames -- great minds think for themselves.

The kids had so much fun on our 100th day of school! As a little treat, they were given tasty materials to make a 100-piece edible necklace. I encouraged them to show me how they could count each fruit-loop en français before gobbling them up!

Toothpicks and erasers are known as non-standard units since they may not all be the same length; toothpicks from one box may be longer than toothpicks from another box. (Centimetres and metres are known as standard units, since every centimetre is exactly the same length.) We had fun throwing paper airplanes, and using non-standard units to measure the distance of our throws.

Can you figure out these sorting rules? Many of them were creatively tricky!

Students worked in pairs to search the pages of our classroom library. Today, we were specifically looking for words that included the sound "in". These kiddos found the word "cousin".

In math today, we were detectives. Students picked their pattern challenge of choice, glued them in their math journals, and then used the math strategies we learned as a group to solve the mystery independently.

In this activity, students knocked down "pins" (aka cube sticks) by bowling and then used subtraction to communicate their results.

Halloween fun! On October 31st, we combined our classrooms to do a fall-themed inquiry activity for math. We used our estimation skills to guess:

• How many seeds would we find in our pumpkin?
• How many toothpicks could Madame fit around the pumpkin? (And what would happen if she added one more toothpick in between each one she's already placed?)
• If the pumpkin was left as-is, would it sink or float in a bucket of water?
• Would it sink or float after Madame carved it?

We tried and tested all of our theories and had loads of fun proving them right and wrong!

This week, students had a blast using homemade finger puppets to act out addition situations. This activity helped us recognize adding in joining situations (e.g. inviting friends to a party) and demonstrating how the small parts (e.g. our guests) combine to make a larger whole (e.g. everyone at the party). Looks like we still need to work on our number writing though!

We use number lines and connecting cubes to deconstruct our equations and represent them visually.

I love watching our kiddos use different tools when applying their new math skills. When counting backwards, some of us like to use a number line, while others like counters. Both are great tools to show our understanding!

During the first week of school we read the book "Olivier cherche sa place" and talked about how our classroom is a place where we all fit in. We painted our own puzzle, and it now proudly hangs on our classroom wall. We are all part of a big and colourful puzzle, where each piece is special and unique in its own way.

Feel like reading it at home?

English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0dtL190LDo

French version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lHfMMWJWbw