Ms. Hartshorn’s Classroom News

October 25, 2007

Dear Families,

You may have heard your child coming home talking about "wreck in wrecks" being used during math in first and second grade.

It’s actually a "Rekenrek," a math tool developed in the Netherlands. It’s composed of one or two separate rods. On the rod(s) are five white and five red beads clustered by color. Some Rekenreks have 10 beads and some have a total of 20 beads. Some of the beads can be hidden with a board or your hand.

The Rekenrek was developed to:

Help children instantly recognize small quantities without counting and to practice visualizing number patterns to ten, for example, being able to easily see 7 as 5+2.

Encourage children to talk about what they see and how they think about what they see, for example seeing that 7 + 6 is the same as 5+5+three more and using the property of ten to add the numbers easily 10+3=13.

The Rekenrek is used to discourage the use of counting by one. Each time your child uses the Rekenrek, your child is asked to show the number with just "one push." Instead of counting 1,2,3,4,5,6 beads, your child should be able to "see" 5 red beads and one more white bead, and "push" the 6 beads over to the other side of the frame.

Using the Rekenrek can be extended into further understanding math concepts, such as being able to visualize 50 and number to 100 on a 100 bead string or Rekenrek. These are skills necessary for math development in second and third grade.

At home, take every opportunity to help your child visualize numbers and parts of numbers. Use dots on dice, put out a collection of four pennies and ask how many, place 5 buttons of the same color in a row and ask "How many more do you need to make ______(a number up to ten for first graders; a number up to 20 for second graders, and a number up to 50 or 100 when your child is ready to advance further).

Moretown History

A blacksmith’s shop, the tea house where ladies gathered to have tea, a big hotel, and even a bandstand. These are just some of buildings that used to inhabit our village of Moretown. At one time, the village area was called Moretown Hollow. Moretown was a "happening" place with at least three mills, a creamery, several tenement houses, a general store, and many sheep and dairy farms. As we walked through the village learning what used to be in our town, we imagined Moretown’s very own marching band parading through the main street that was nothing, but dirt at the time, with an occasional wooden bridge to cross the water. Farmers even had their cows walking in the middle of the dirt road in order to get from one pasture to the next, or back to the barns for milking. On Tuesday when it rained, we thought how muddy the main road must have been, and how it must have been difficult for horses to pull wagon wheels through the deep mud.

By the time you get this newsletter, we will have already gone on our bus tour of some schoolhouse sites in our town. I’m sure this trip will have made a huge impression on your child for a couple of reasons. First of all, your child will see how geographically spread out Moretown is. By the time we arrive back to school, your child will have seen the far corners of Moretown and traveled through several other communities, such as Duxbury, Waterbury, Middlesex, and even Berlin, but all arriving back into a section of Moretown. The school sites visited include: Rockbridge, Cobb Hill (as close as we can get), South Hill, Common, Honan, Taplin, Jones Brook, Cox Brook, and of course, back to the Village School. At each of these stops, the children who live in that area, got off the bus and had their picture taken. In this way, your child can imagine where he or she would have gone to school in years past, and the neighbors who might have been in the same one-room school house with him or her—all grades from 1 through 8 mixed together with one teacher. Oh my! Many of us think this might have been fun, but over the next few weeks, we’ll learn what school life was really like back in the day. Probably not as much fun as one might think at first.

Last, but certainly not least, we experienced a Four Winds lesson about grasses and grains that grow in our own Vermont backyards. I will send you an update of this lesson tomorrow—Friday, since this lesson took place Thursday afternoon—after this newsletter was written.

Many thanks to Michelle Beard (Seth’s Mom) and Kelly Green (Cheyanne’s Mom) for all of the coffee cans! We will be using the smaller ones next week to try our hand at "dipping" candles. Hopefully, this will give children an idea of what it might have been like to have to make your own light source before electricity became so prevalent. The larger cans will be put away and saved for another special project at a later date. Shhh! I’ll keep that one a secret for now, but those large cans are hard to find, and will come in very handy one day.

Spelling word lists are coming home with everyone today. Find five minutes each day to practice these words with your child.

Enjoy the last October weekend of 2007!

Brenda