Welcome Back, Reading like a News Reporter, Regrouping, Perspective and Point of View

Welcome back! Happy 2018. 

Reminder: If you forgot to do so please bring back your indoor shoes tomorrow. We took them home over the break to clean them, freshen them up, make sure they still fit and so that the classroom could be properly cleaned. Some student's forgot to bring them back today and had to wear their boots all day.

Reminder: This Wednesday January 10th will be our next Book Truck Day. We are so excited to sign a new book out from the Library Truck! 

Literacy: READING LIKE A NEWS REPORTER

Today we looked at how we can read like a News Reporter. We explored some news websites for kids. These websites have kid friendly articles about current events and we will be using articles of interest to improve our fluency and expand our vocabulary by Reading like a News Reporter! 

We will continue to look at these sites and find news that seems interesting to us. Please visit one or two of the sites and start to notice articles of interest to you. On Fridays please bring in 1 article that you would be interested in practicing reading and presenting to the class alone or with a partner (once you have had time to practice reading like a news reporter). 

https://htekidsnews.com/

http://teachingkidsnews.com/

https://www.currents4kids.com/

Today we looked at particular reading passages and worked on adding exclamation points ! to where we wanted our voices to have excitement or question marks ? to where we were asking a question. We imagined that we worked for CTV News or Global or CBC and we watched Anchor Woman and Anchor Men and noted how we thought they looked, sounded and seemed when they were reporting the news. 

We practiced making THINK NOTES when we looked at current event articles. 

We used these THINKMARKS before when we were "Reading Like a Scientist". By making these Thinkmarks then it will help us to know how to make our voices sound when we are reading out-loud, to an audience. We will know by our Thinkmarks whether or not to make our voice sound funny, surprised, serious, confused or questioning and this will make our Audience sit up and take note of GRADE 2 BREAKING NEWS!!


Math
Regrouping and Stacking


Today we reviewed place value and broke numbers into their ones (cabins), tens (houses) and hundreds (mansions). 

For example if I have 2 mansions, 4 houses and 3 cabins what number does that make?

Can I count it out starting from the mansions (100, 200), counting on adding in the houses (210, 220, 230, 240) and finally adding the cabins (241, 242, 243). 

Can I explain how I know and not just what the number is? 

We also practiced building two numbers and then adding them together. 

We looked at what regrouping means and why we need to regroup if we have ten cabins or ten houses. 

 145+265 can also be written like using the stacking method where two numbers are stacked on top of one another to add them together. 

 If you have ten cabins (ones) they need to stick together, make a ten stick and move on over to the house street! (tens).

If you have ten houses (tens) they cannot live on house street anymore and need to move to Mansion street! (hundreds). 

Now we have our final answer of 410. 

We will be practicing this strategy of stacking and regrouping as needed all week.


Perspective and Point of View:

Today we read The Little House book again. We read it twice before winter break. We talked about how we thought that the Little house felt and then shifted our focus to how we thought the City felt. We talked about how our point of view changes depending on our perspective. 

Different people will have different perspectives depending on their lives, and what has happened to them. When an author writes a story they could be telling the story from their point of view, from a character's point of view or from multiple points of view. 

It is important to be able to start to see others points of view even if we don't agree or if our perspective is different. We have all had different experiences, like different things and have different feelings about certain topics because of who we are and where we come from. If we can see things from other's eyes it can help us to understand each other and be able to empathize and care about each other more. 

Tomorrow we will be working in groups taking the perspective of either The Little House or The City. We will be looking at the idea of Change in the story and deciding whether that change was good or bad and why depending on which character's perspective we are defending.