To say that May has flown by is an understatement! I can't believe that we are heading into June this week! I am not ready to have my last month with your amazing kids!
This around RBES have been BUSY over the past few weeks!
BIKE SAFETY
Bike Safety is always and exciting time at RBES! We kicked it off a week early with a visit from two Health Nurses with a presentation on helmet use and brain injuries. We've been doing this for a couple of years now and the presentations are very informative and interactive for the students. They have the opportunity to touch a model brain that has the same consistency as their own brains. The purpose of this is to remind them how fragile our brains are. Proper helmet fitting is also reviewed in addition to the symptoms of a concussion. The famous egg drop experiment is done showing students how a fragile egg can drop without cracking when the helmet is on properly...but without the helmet...things get pretty messy. The goal of the presentation is to encourage helmet use whenever students are participating in wheeled activities (biking, skateboarding and scootering). It amazes me how I still see kids riding around Devon without a helmet, despite all of our efforts with our Bike Safety program at RBES.
We also were lucky enough to have a handful of members of the Devon Bicycle Association to join us for our helmet checks again this year! Most of the helmets were fitting students well or were able to be adjusted, however some were not. For future reference, after the experience of fitting 300+ helmets each year, we can make a few general recommendations to save you time and money when purchasing a bike helmet for your child. The bike helmets that fit the best are the proper bike helmet style WITH the adjustable dial in the back. These helmets can last students for multiple seasons because they are highly adjustable. The hardest bike helmets to adjust to fit students properly are the "bucket" or "skateboard" style. We realize that students really like the looks of these helmets and often really want them but they are often very difficult to make fit properly. Even when applying the 2-V-1 rule, many helmets can still come completely off the child's head. Extra padding inserts must be used to ensure a proper fit.
Throughout Bike Safety Week students participated in a variety of activities and skill builders on the school field. We focused on starting and stopping, hand signals, control when maneuvering your bike through twists and turns and cycling in a group safely. On Thursday, the students enjoyed a Bike Rodeo in the arena! It was a great week!
LITERACY
I usually dedicate the first six periods of our days to literacy but with swimming eating up a large portion of our afternoons, I've had to cut back our literacy time to the first three periods. We have been focusing mainly on read alouds, read to self and journal writing. Students are finishing up the illustrations on the stuck stories and will soon be writing an "About the Author" paragraph.
NUMERACY
Students have been working on the concepts of division and how they relate to multiplication over the past couple of weeks. Students have been working with writing the fact families (2 multiplication sentences and 2 division sentences) when given a picture or an array.
Students are now moving on to more abstract pre-problem solving skills. If they are given only 2 of the 3 numbers needed WITHOUT a picture/array as a prompt, they need to find out if they have to multiply or divide to find the unknown number. This is proving to be a bit tricky for some students.
For example; if I say:
"I know that I have 24 lines in all and I have 6 sets."
Students need to figure out that they don't know how many are in each set. To find the answer to this, they need to divide 24 divided by 6.
A hint that we have been using is:
We know that division sentences ALWAYS start with the biggest number (the total number). If you have the biggest number/total number, you know that you can write a division question to answer. If you do not have the biggest number/total number, you know that you have to multiply because the answer to a multiplication question is the total number.
We will continue to work on these skills this week and start applying them to the problem solving context. We will be finishing this unit this week.
SOCIAL STUDIES
Students have enjoyed learning about Ukraine! They were intrigued by the history and amazed by the population compared to the small land size! They ABSOLUTELY LOVED visiting Ukrainian Village! We definitely didn't get a chance to see everything during our stay and I know that many of them were talking about wanting to go back...maybe a nice family day trip in the summer?
