In math today, we worked on Topic 17, Lesson 2 “Fact Families”. Gracyn was excited to use her new dice set to generate two sets of fact families on the opening page of the lesson.
We then worked through the Guided Practice and Independent Practice sections in which we discussed and completed problems involving looking at the whole and it’s two parts to create the two addition facts and related subtraction facts to complete the fact family. Finally, we read and completed the problem solving work on the back page. This lesson increased in complexity by reversing the sequence of the addition and subtraction sentences (i.e. 11 = 3 + 8, in which they had the sum written first). We discussed that we need each side of the = sign to be the same value.
Additionally, we watched a Brain Pop Jr. learning video on the “Calendar”. We reviewed the “Days of the Week” song as well as the “Months of the Year” song. We watched and discussed topics including how people use the calendar for marking important dates, before and after with days and months, and ways to write the date. Gracyn completed her first timed math drill in her new workbook, “More Minute Math Drills – Addition & Subtraction”. She scored a 100% on her 25 problems of +1 in 1 minute, 45 seconds. We will continue to drill simple problems and increase in difficulty to aid in mastery and fluency in the execution of basic math facts. In closing, we read the first half of a fun storybook entitled, "If I Were a Plus Sign" by
Trisha Speed Shaskan. The book utilized characters in a story format to explain a bit more about addition. For example, it showed how the word "and" can be used to indicate addition. We also saw how the addends in an addition sentence can be flipped, as well as problems can be written vertically or horizontally.