Hello everyone! Despite the shorter week and the chilly weather outside, things were heating up in the classroom! We packed a ton of learning and fun into these four days. Ready for the highlights? Let's take a look at what we accomplished.
Enemy Pie: In this story, a boy is upset by the arrival of a new neighbor, Jeremy Ross, and is told by his father to give Jeremy "Enemy Pie" to get rid of him. However, the secret recipe requires the boy to spend the entire day playing with Jeremy to make the pie work. As they play and have fun, the boy realizes Jeremy isn't an enemy, and by the end of the day, they have become friends, effectively "getting rid" of the enemy by turning him into a friend.This week, we kicked off a major unit focused on the concept of earning money and personal responsibility!
We introduced the unit using the wonderful story, Earn It by Cinders McLeod. This book tells the tale of Bun, a bunny who initially desires instant fame and wealth through singing, but soon discovers that achieving her dreams—and earning her "carrots"—requires hard work and effort through chores like walking her dog and helping in the garden. It's a perfect guide for teaching our young students about financial literacy and the deep satisfaction of earning accomplishments rather than expecting instant results.
The Class "Job": Homework Bags for Dollars
To bring this lesson to life, your children will now have a real job!
Starting next week, their daily task of consistently returning their homework bag (with the book inside) will become a paying position.
The Paycheck: They will receive $1 each day they successfully complete this chore.
Maximum Earnings: Over the course of the unit, they can earn up to $22 just from this job.
Bonus Opportunity: We are also connecting financial literacy with our class goal of thinking of others. Any time a student performs an act that demonstrates exceptional kindness or consideration, they will receive a $1 bonus!
The Spending Challenge: Save for a Special Reward
Students have been presented with a list of items they can purchase with their earnings:
The Movie Night Event
The big incentive is the Movie Ticket. Buying this ticket secures a spot at our special Movie Night on Wednesday, November 19th, from 2:30 PM to 5:30 PM. This event will allow the children to stay right after school, running through the typical after-school program hours. It will be a full, authentic movie theater experience, complete with popcorn, drinks, and candy!
The Lesson in Saving
Here is the essential "catch": if a student decides to purchase a $7 prize early on, it will become very challenging to save enough for the $17 movie ticket. This is the core teaching point of the unit! Through this experience, the students will learn about earning, saving, and smart spending, as well as the importance of giving.
We will be working through these saving strategies in class, but it would be incredibly helpful if you could chat with your child at home about this new opportunity. Discuss why they might want to save enough for the movie ticket and what the benefits of delayed gratification can be.
Thank you for supporting this exciting and practical learning experience!
MATH:
First-grade students continued practicing the ability to recognize numbers on a Rekenrek because it is a powerful visual tool for building number sense and developing flexible mathematical thinking. The Rekenrek is designed to help students move beyond counting one-by-one by emphasizing key mathematical benchmarks:
1. Subitizing and Fluency
Subitizing: This is the ability to instantly "just know" how many objects are in a small group without counting.
The Rekenrek's design—two rows of ten beads, with the first five of one color (e.g., red) and the next five of another (e.g., white)—forces students to subitize. For example, instead of counting to seven, a student instantly sees the group of 5 red beads and 2 more white beads, recognizing the total as 7 immediately.
Efficiency: This practice encourages them to see numbers as groups (5 and 10), which is much faster and more efficient than counting every single bead.
2. Anchoring to 5 and 10
Base-10 System: The Rekenrek is built around the base-10 system, which is fundamental to math.
The visual break at the five-mark and the ten-mark helps students use these numbers as "anchors." Composing and Decomposing: It helps students visualize how numbers are composed (put
To make the number 8, a student can easily see and manipulate the beads to show or , strengthening their understanding of number bonds.
together) and decomposed (broken apart).
3. Developing Mental Math Strategies
By physically and visually working with the Rekenrek, students build a mental model for strategies used in addition and subtraction, which is a key first-grade skill.
Make-a-Ten: To solve , a student can see that moving 3 beads from the 6 to the 7 makes a group of 10, leaving . The Rekenrek makes this process concrete.
Doubles and Near Doubles: It provides a great visual for working on facts like
(a row of 5 plus 1 on each row) and .
In short, practice on the Rekenrek shifts first graders from basic counting to strategic thinking and a deeper, more flexible understanding of numbers.
Second grade math work pushed the students to become more flexible and strategic thinkers! We dove into three interrelated concepts designed to strengthen their overall number sense:
"Finding the Difference" Challenges: We worked extensively on finding the difference between two numbers. This is a crucial skill that teaches students to see subtraction not just as "taking away," but as the distance between two numbers. This conceptual understanding is key for developing advanced strategies.
Multiple Addend Equations: Students practiced solving equations with three or more numbers (e.g., ). This is an important step in building mental math fluency, as it encourages them to look for groupings like "making a ten" or using doubles to simplify the calculation.
Application Through Story Problems: We applied all of these new skills to a variety of addition and subtraction story problems. The focus was on moving past simple keyword hunting and encouraging students to model and visualize the problem scenario, enabling them to correctly identify and solve both "joining" and "separating" problem types.
This focused practice is essential for building a solid foundation as we move toward place value and multi-digit operations!
Launching Our Personal Narrative Writing Workshop
This week marked the start of our first formal writing unit: Personal Narratives. This unit is foundational, teaching students the essential craft moves required for compelling storytelling.
Our primary instructional focus has been on mastering the scope of a narrative, specifically the concept of the "Small Moment." We used the classic "Watermelon and Watermelon Seed" analogy to guide their thinking:
Students are learning to avoid writing a "watermelon" story (a summary of a long period) and instead zoom in on a "seed" story—a single, focused event that took place in a short span of time (e.g., a few minutes or seconds).
This intense focus allows them to apply essential writing techniques such as stretching the action and incorporating rich sensory details to show, not tell, their experience.
The early drafts from this first week already show a strong grasp of narrative focus, and I'm very excited to see how their descriptive writing develops throughout this unit.
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I have to apologize to this week's Student of the Week. I forgot to take a picture of the student with the "Frame." The short week threw me off and I realized (as I was writing this post) that I forgot to get the photo today. Luckily I have this photo to use instead. This student is a 2nd grader and his favorite color is blue. He has a brother that is in 4th grade. His favorite food is pizza his favorite activity is to skateboard. He wants to be an F-1 driver when he is an adult. His favorite place to visit is Lego Land. Congratulations to this week's Student of the Week!
GLOBAL READ-A-LOUD:
On Monday, Mr. Mongeon came into our classroom and read the 1st book from the Global Read-A-Loud project. This is a project that Mr. Mongeon and I are collaborating on. The first week of our Global Read Aloud focused on introducing the beautiful, heartwarming story of Thank You, Omu! and the central themes of generosity and community. After we read the book, the students made thank you cards to someone that has been kind to them. They also mimicked the author and illustrator by adding touches of the collage concept. This project will have a dedicated bulletin board inside our classroom library.
NOTES:
*Everyone that ordered books from the Scholastic Book Club should have received their books on Tuesday.
*Please don;t forget to send your child in with sneakers on Wednesdays and Thursdays. These are PE days and Kai would like to see everyone with shoes that are meant for PE class.
*With a long weekend scheduled, I did not send home the homework bags over the weekend.
*Remember, there is no school on Monday. Enjoy the long weekend.
That is all for now. I hope you all have a great weekend.
Peace,
Mr. Young
