Christmas Celebrations

We enjoyed a variety of Christmas activities this week, in preparation for the upcoming holiday season.

A tradition that has been happening in our school for over 30 years, is the carol sing each morning of the last week of school.  All of our classes gather in the gym for about the first half hour of the day to sing a variety of Christmas carols, led by different teachers.  It really puts everyone in the Christmas mood!  Today we were even treated to a JibJab Christmas greeting video featuring our principals--it was pretty funny to see them dancing, dressed as elves!  Today was also the day we got to invite our parents to join us for the carol sing and then have hot chocolate with us.

Many of us came back after dinner on Tuesday night for our Open House, where we got to share some Christmas cheer and make a craft.  Our mission was to create a cuter (or crazier!) reindeer gift bag using a brown paper lunch bag and some construction paper.  Have a look at what we created!

We also enjoyed a couple of Kid President videos about the holidays.  The first one was his "Holiday Gift Giving Guide".  He had lots of great advice and encouraged us to "do something awesome!"  We especially loved his quote..."Giving gifts can save the world, especially when they are full of love". 

We also watched the video of Kid President writing his letter to Santa.

 

 

We did an estimating activity using green and red gummy bears.  Our teacher showed us this jar:

She also showed us 10 gummy bears in her hand, so that we could see what 10 looked like.  Then each person got a sticky note, wrote down their estimate of the total number of gummy bears and put it on the chart:





Using clues, our teacher gave us (it's a 3-digit number, it's odd, and the sum of the digits is 3), we figured out that the actual total was 111.  Baileigh was only one off!  As a reward for estimating, we got to eat some of the gummy bears, but of course, Baileigh got the most because she was the closest.

Before starting our gift exchange, we watching a story online called "Howard B. Wigglebottom and the Power of Giving: A Christmas Story".  Everyone in our class bought a Christmas mug and filled it with small treats and toys.  Boys brought a gift for a boy and girls brought a gift for a girl.  Each gift was numbered and we all got to pick a number to find out which gift would be ours.  We loved watching each other open up the gifts.  It was such a nice way to give a gift to a classmate.  Have a look at the wonderful gifts!

With all of that gift opening, we needed a clean up crew...

To end our day and week, we gathered to watch "Merry Madagascar".

Now we are off for a couple of weeks, to spend time celebrating with our friends and family.  But we just wanted to say...MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone out there who reads our blog.  See you in 2014! 

We were wondering...

What did you do this week at school to celebrate and prepare for the holidays?
What is one of your favourite things about the holiday season?

Eating Our Math Work

We've been learning about different ways to represent and describe 3-digit numbers.  This week we used food to show our thinking about numbers.  The Shreddies represented hundreds (flats), the hickory sticks represented tens (rods) and the Froot Loops represented ones (units).  Our teacher took pictures of us working with the food as we built different numbers.

Later in the week, we got our picture back and then had to write about the number by answering the question "What do you know about the number               ?"  Here is some of our thinking about our numbers.

It has 7 hundreds, 3 tens and 5 ones.

 I stretched the number apart so I did this: 300 + 40 + 5 = 345.

 Six hundred forty-eight is part of the even two pattern.

 200 + 90 + 2 = 292

 In 287, there are 2 hundreds, 8 tens and 7 ones.

 9 is in the hundreds place, the other 9 is in the tens place and the 5 is in the ones place.

 800 + 60 + 5 = 865

 It is in the five pattern and the ten pattern.

 200 + 59 + 1 and 59 + 200 + 1

 It's even and has 3 digits.

 4 X 100 + 7 X 10 + 2 X 2 = 474

 Ten more: 459, 469, 479

 There are 4 hundreds, 4 tens and 9 ones and it equals 449.

 It's spelled: nine hundred thirty-seven.

 1 X 937 = 937

 Ten more is 983 and 10 less is 963.

 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 993

 I wasn't at school today to do the writing activity.

 It is a 3 digit number.

 I wasn't at school today to do the writing.

 I wasn't at the school today to do the writing.

It's an odd number.

It has eight hundreds.

It is greater than 426.  It is less than 648.

 

I count this number like this: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58.

 



When we were finished all of our hard work building numbers, we got to eat the food--probably the best part of the activity!

We were wondering...

Have you ever used food to help you practice math?

What else can you tell us about our numbers?