We have begun a new unit in maths where students extend and deepen 2nd grade practise with ‘equal shares’ to understanding fractions as equal partitions of a whole. They formalise their knowledge as they work with area models and the number line. During this unit, the students will:
- Develop understanding of fractions as numbers
- Understand a fraction 1/b as the quantity formed by 1 part when a whole is partitioned into b equal parts
- Understand a fraction a/b as the quantity formed by a parts of size 1/b
- Understand a fraction as a number on the number line; represent fractions on a number line diagram.
- Explain equivalence of fractions and compare fractions by reasoning about their size.
- Partition shapes into parts with equal areas
For this unit, key vocabulary and new ideas will be:
- Unit fraction
- fractions with numerator of 1 and with numerators other than 1
- Fractional unit: half, third, fourth, etc.
- Equal parts: parts with equal measurements
- Unit interval: the interval from 0 to 1,
- Equal Shares
- Whole Fraction
- Partition
You can help your child at home by practising partitioning household items (pieces of paper, portions of food, a pack of crayons, etc.) into equal parts.
We have also begun our new unit of inquiry: How we organise ourselves. In this unit, we will be focusing on how people learn, this week we brainstormed how people might learn and created a mind map. We will continue to add to this map as our understanding grows. The students generated all of the ideas about how we might learn; please see the mind map in our photos.
Please see here for information about our new UOI:
Please see photos here.
Our new writing unit is poetry which works really well within our new UOI. We have been listening to poems, reading poems and generating our own poems. As an introduction we defined what poetry is and what features and characteristics a poem might have. We then identified these in a variety of poems. From there, we wrote poems about ourselves. This morning we reviewed the 5 senses and how these not only help us learn, they can also be used to write sensory poems. We read a poem about popcorn, then went for a campus walk to use our senses (aside from taste) as an inspiration for our own sensory poems. I’m sure you child will be excited to share any of the poems they have written this week!
The reading strategy we have been practising this week is ‘Tuning into interesting words’. There are so many fabulous words in the world and we are listening carefully for them or finding them in our readings. Please help your child to keep a look out and tune into interesting words to expand their vocabulary.