Ending September

Last week was the first week of clubs on our Early Release Day. This week the kids did art club in our classroom with me. We painted fall trees using the eraser on a pencil.

The kids thought it was a lot of fun and these paintings went home with kids last Thursday. Each early release day they will get to visit another teacher and participate in a different club activity.

Extended Form and Comparing Numbers

We have also been working on writing numbers in extended form and comparing numbers. This week we practiced these skills on white boards, on the SMART board and during math centers.

Reading Counts

Students in second grade participate in a program called Reading Counts by Scholastic. This program provides students with a way to test their reading comprehension after they read a book. In class when students have a 70% or higher they get class iPad time. At the end of the school year there is also a school wide reading carnival that they can participate in. During this past week we got to have our first class iPad time. Students only have access to the Reading Counts program at school but they can read a book at home for their reading log and then take a reading counts comprehension test in school during the specified times. The goal of the Reading Counts program isn't to test kids but to allow them to see and monitor their own reading comprehension.

Math Time

For the past three weeks students have been studying how to add simple facts with two digits and with three digits. This was mainly a review for many kids however, some of the strategies that were taught were new. From there we moved on to fact families last week. With a fact family students have to identify the two parts and the whole of each fact family. Students worked together in groups of 4-5 and solved for a fact family and then presented it to the class. This presentation provided students with an opportunity to explain their thinking which is a skill we will be working on all year. The kids loved being the teacher and explaining what they did to solve their problem. (If a kid was facing the camera I put a frog face on them just to protect their identity on the internet.)

We also got to practice solving for fact families on our white boards.

After our main math lesson students work on Math centers. This was the first week we have been working on math centers and the kids love them! There were three main games this week.

#1. Firecracker Boom
For this game two students play together. The first player picks a card. If he/she gets the answer right then they can keep the card. Then the second player goes and picks a card and if they get the problem right then he/she can keep the card. This goes on until someone pulls the Boom card. Once someone pulls the Boom card they have to put all the cards they have collected back into the main deck of cards. Whoever has the most cards at the end of the game is the winner.

#2. Collect 11
This is a two player game. Each player takes turns finding two numbers on the game board, that are next to each other, and add up to 11. Once they find a set of numbers that follows this criteria they color them in. The winner is the person who finds the last set of numbers that adds up to 11.

#3. Monkey Bump
This is a two player game. Each player will take turns rolling 2 dice. They will add the numbers on each dice together and solve how much needs to be added to this number to make 20. The player then cover this number with a colored chip. For Example: If a player rolls 2 and 5, they would cover 13. If another player has covered that number, they can ‘bump’ that counter off and put one of their own counters on it. If that number is covered by one of the player’s own counters, they can add another counter on top and then they have won that space. You can only ‘bump’ when there is only one counter on the number. The winner of the game is the first player to use all 8 of their counters.

Thanks for checking our website to see what kids have been doing. Come back soon to see what is new each week!