In celebration of Earth Day students learned about the layers of the earth and ways to take care of our planet.  Ask your child some ways he or she learned to help take care of the earth.  We made a model of the earth out of clay.  Your child should be able to tell you some facts about the different earth layers.  
     In math we are exploring equal groups as we continue to lay the foundations for multiplication.  We are working with cubes to make buildings.  Each building has the same number of rooms (cubes) on each floor in the same configuration.  We are using tables to figure out the total number of rooms each building contains based on the number of floors.  Then we consider the multiplicative relationships in the tables and consider why some tables look the same even though they represent different building designs.  All this hands-on modeling with cube arrays helps students develop their understanding of arrays and is an important step in developing student understanding of why the dimensions of a rectangle can be multiplied to determine the area, work they will encounter in grade 3 and beyond.  
     We had another pocket day this week.  This time students worked with a list of classroom names.  Students stated how many pockets they had and we wrote down the number next to the student's name.  Then students added up all 23 numbers to figure out the total number of pockets.  This was great practice using their math facts.  When we finished doing our own addition, we learned how to use a Google Sheet to add a column of numbers.  
     Please mark your calendars to attend our Open House this Wednesday evening.