Presentation Night

Last Thursday was Presentation Night at Tutu's school. It is a night where the students teach their parents a lesson that they have learned this year at school. Zoe was so excited about this night...she's been talking about it for weeks. Of course they have been preparing for it for weeks too. We brought Grannie and Papaw with us and went out to dinner before heading back to school. When we arrived at school, we headed down to her classroom where the entire room was set up and each student had their own little work station labelled with a name plate that they made earlier in the week.

Zoe taught us "The Grand Layout". It is a project designed to teach them about numbers and their values. The first step uses several sets of tiles of numbers. It starts with the ones place, then progresses to the tens, hundreds, and thousands. The kids layout the tiles in the correct order starting with the ones and working across the mat to the thousands place.







After all the tiles are laid out, then the kids begin adding beads next to each tile. They are to count out the beads to equal the number on the tile. As they change from the ones to the tens and so on down the line things are simplified by using what are called units. The tens are 10 beads fused together to make one unit of ten beads. When you move from the tens to the hundreds the beads become blocks with dots on them to represent the beads. It really shows them the value of each number.





At the end of the night we only did up to number three for each number place. Her teachers said that if she does the entire thing during the school day it takes her about two hours. We saw pictures of her with the whole thing done displayed on the wall. It was really impressive. The blocks on the thousands place were stacked as tall as she is.


We also learned about how things work in her classroom because we saw her taking out supplies and putting them away. She even demonstrated to us the correct way to walk from one part of the room to the other. Her teacher said we better take a picture of that, because she never does it that way with a bubble in her mouth :)



It was a blast! I learned so much and was so impressed that she is learning so much. I cannot remember when I learned about numbers with a thousand place, but I'm certain that it was not when I was in preschool. It was an amazing sight to see!!!