Gr 2 Week of 1/23/18

Hello Families!

As I’m sure you’ve heard, we had a wonderful time on New Amsterdam Day! The kids were full of spirit and enthusiasm, as you’ll see in the pictures below. Thank you again for your support and generous donations. Without you, this day would not have been possible!

Now we are jumping ahead in time, to the late 1800s/early 1900s, when immigration soared and people in New York City lived vastly different lives from one another. Tomorrow we will travel to the Tenement Museum to witness what life was like for new immigrants. Our program is scheduled during our typical lunch time, so our plan is to eat a big snack/early lunch before we leave school, and to snack again when we return. Please make sure you send your child with plenty of snacks tomorrow!

This week in math we started a new investigation called The T-Shirt Factory. We will be exploring place value through the context of this unit. Our goal is for the children to develop a deep conceptual understanding of place value and ultimately of how and why the traditional algorithm works as a strategy based on place value. The unit begins within the context of a family that runs a t-shirt business. The family decides to organize their inventory of t-shirts into rolls of ten t-shirts and loose ones. This week, students explored how many rolls and loose shirts could be made from different numbers of shirts (ex. 43 shirts, 182 shirts). Already, some big ideas and concepts arose, including the need for organization, patterns in the number system, and equivalence. To support this unit at home, your mathematician can practice adding and subtracting 10 to any number: 37+10, 83-10, for example. This is especially important as kids cross over the hundreds: 96+10, 108-10.

Here are some pictures from New Amsterdam Day:

Have a great week,

Ms, Mathis