How Big is a “Foot”

 

Today was yet another cold day at the school with temperatures around -12 to 6 degrees throughout the day. The students were bundled up and made it safely to school. We began the day as usual with DLR and then the students worked on their spelling packets while I went around the room and answered questions. Today’s math lesson was really fun! We learned about how to measure in not only inches but feet as well. I drew a bunch of lines on the board and had the students answer questions about how long each line was in feet and in inches. The students also saw the connection between inches to feet and multiplication, such as 2 feet is 24 inches (12 x 2=24). In their small groups, the students then were asked to measure certain objects around the room and tell me about how long their object was in feet and inches. The students measured the height of the trashcan, length of the bookcase, length of their desks, height of the door and more! Finally to conclude the lesson we lined up 11 rulers on the floor and the students each walked heal to heal beside the rulers to see about how long their “foot” is compared to the 12 inches “foot”. 

Estimating and “Honest Abe” Biographies

What a biography filled day! The students have finally begun to write their biographies of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Since our February quilt pieces are of Abraham Lincoln, the students started writing his biography first. We worked really hard today to make sure each of the students had a main idea, at least three details and a conclusion in their biography. Since we have been reading biographies this week in reading, this English writing unit goes along so well. After reading a biography about Theodore Roosevelt in their reading textbooks, the students worked on rewriting a paragraph about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Rather than using the pronoun “he” in every sentence, the students had to look back in their notes and find other names to call Abraham Lincoln and George Washington (such as Honest Abe and General Washington). Then we went from working on that short paragraph to the students writing their own paragraph to get their biographies started. Each of the students turned in their biography and after placing revision marks and highlighting nouns pink I really am very proud of how well their biographies turned out. Many of the students wrote many details about Lincolin’s life and placed events in chronological order. 

Time to Read Biographies

We started our biographies unit in reading today and the students read a short biography of Ellen Ochoa in their textbooks called . The second graders learned how she became the first Hispanic woman in space and how her life changed because she followed her dreams. We worked together as a whole class to read the biography and then take some notes about her life. We first went through a quick timeline of her life which included events like her birth, her first space shuttle flight and when she first joined NASA. The students also filled out a list of her accomplishments and why we remember her. We will be reading all kinds of different biographies this week and the students will be able to see how a biography is written. Since we have been working on information about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln over the past few days, the students will be writing a biography about each of them later this week to tie english and social studies into this reading unit. Then next week they will be put into pairs to work on short biographies and create timelines to present to the class. 

Tests, Tests Everywhere- Farklempt, Quarters and More!

The week has once again flown by rather quickly as we come to Friday of this week. Today was quite a long day for the students as they had to take three different tests today. Their first test was of course the weekly spelling test which takes place on Friday. My spelling group had some very difficult challenge words such as farklempt (which came from a book we read). If you don’t know what farklempt is.. Why not go look it up right now and find out? The students had to use their challenge words to create their own sentences using each word per sentence. The students seemed to understand the words and did a nice job overall on the unit 20 spelling test. As for the other two tests, one was in reading and the third was the last of the ed performance tests. Since this week was the wrap up of unit 4, the students took their reading test about the animals unit. The test involved multiple choice, cause and effect charts and writing a two paragraph research topic. The main readings in the test were about spiders, which excited many of the students since they knew a lot about spiders already.

Groups of 10- We just learned Multiplication!

2nd Graders learning multiplication? Oh yes today they learned their first multiplication facts which by the picture at the top of this post was, guess what? Multiplying by 10! The students worked in pairs today using the unifix cubes (in groups of 10) to find multiples of 10. If a pair of students had 3 groups of 10 unifix cubes, they would come up to the board and write 3 groups of 10 as well as 3 x 10 =30. Then I would have the groups give away certain groups of 10 to other student pairs and they would find how many groups of 10 they had after the switch. The students did a really wonderful job with their groups of 10 and even found the trick/pattern to multiplying by 10, which is to take the original number and add a zero to it. I have posted some links to 10’s multiplication to the bottom of this post.

Mighty Regrouping Dinosaurs

It was a very challenging Wednesday for the students today. During our math time, the students once again visited the new realm of two-digit subtraction using regrouping. This time I showed the students another way to count numbers and regroup using base ten blocks. The students were given some subtraction problem examples and we would work through the regrouping process as a class. This is a brand new concept to the students so they once again had a very tough time figuring it out. I will say that I am very proud for how hard the second graders worked during math yesterday. We were doing math for a long time to just keep practicing. I could really start to see improvement and some “light bulbs” go off in the students throughout the day. Towards the end of the day, I had a one-on-one conference with many of the students to go over regrouping and sure enough many of them had figured out regrouping and were able to do some problems on their own with guidance!! I couldn’t be more happier when each student had their breakthrough with regrouping subtraction. Now the key is for me to keep letting the students practice so that they will all have regrouping mastered. It is going to take quite some time for that, but it is a goal I know the students can reach.

Little Grunt and the Big…Day

Today went by pretty quick as the students did ed performance testing in the afternoon, which took up about an hour and a half of the day. For math the students completed Assessment 17 that they started on Friday morning. The assessment consists of 60 math facts that are timed for four minutes. The students have to complete as many and as best they can in that amount of time. The students then mark what problems they completed in the allowed time and finish any unfinished problems during their work time. As for the main lesson in math today, the students were once again working with the tangrams. This time however, the students were learning how you can create the same shape using a different set of tangrams. So they were able to come up with around 4 ways per large shape that they could fill with different tangrams. The students really enjoyed this activity and also learned a lot about how shapes come together to create larger shapes. As for reading, the students read another story from their Reading Textbooks. This week is the last of Unit 4 which deals with animals past and present. Today’s story was called Little Grunt and the Big Egg, which was all about a young caveman, his family and his new pet dinosaur George (first image of this post).

Another week has gone by so fast

I apologize for not writing about what happened in the class yesterday. I have come down with some weird throat bug that has made my voice very raspy and minimal, so I took yesterday evening to lay down and get some rest. But here is a quick write-up about yesterday….

Our math lesson was quick as most of the morning we were giving the DIBLES test to the students. DIBELS is a literacy test given to the students at the beginning, middle and end of the year. If you want to find out more about DIBELS, click on the logo at the bottom of this post to be taken to the main website for the text. In reading yesterday, the second graders worked on a highlighting activity. The activity had the class highlighting the nouns in a short story and then re-writing the sentences adding adjectives to describe the nouns they had highlighted. The students came up with a lot of a great adjectives and we created a more interesting story by adding them to the nouns. For the rest of the day, the students just worked on their activities and workbook pages.

Regrouping and Catching Up

Today’s lessons had the students really puzzled. For the first time ever, the second graders began their journey into learning subtraction with regrouping (those of you who are older would know this process as “borrowing”) . The students used dimes and pennies to help them solve two-digit subtraction problems such as 56¢ – 12¢ = 44¢ and so on. The students did really well with the basic subtraction concepts but once we got to problems with regrouping, the students began to struggle. The main problem the students were trying to solve is 62¢ – 27¢ and the reminder to them was that we cannot take away 7 ones from 2 ones, so we had to regroup/borrow a ten from the 6 tens or 60 portion of 62. This concept was very tricky. but I will say that although most of the students still do not understand regrouping, many of them began to understand the concept without realizing they understood.

A Busy day Back

Today was my first day teaching the entire morning with math and reading. It was very busy so we were constantly on our feet helping the kids, working with technology and getting materials prepared. In math today, the students learned how to write cents in two different ways. One way is using the cent symbol they are use to and the other way is to write it out using a dollar sign. The students caught onto this really fast so the math went by rather quickly as the students completed their worksheets. I also designed a clock practice sheet which the students used along  with small clocks to practice telling time. The students have been somewhat struggling to get their little hand as the hour and big hand as the minutes. We practiced turning the clock hands to set specific times. I used the larger Judy clock in the front of the room to ask them questions about what time I had set. This activity seemed to help many of the struggling students, and was also a great review for other students.