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. 

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.

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.

Fraction Fun with Tangrams

The students were able to do an activity today that was really hands on. I was only at the school during the morning today, as I had a mandatory student teacher meeting to attend at the University from 1:15- 4:00pm. However, the time I did spend with the students this morning was so much fun and they did an excellent job! We started math with the meeting board as usual and the students were able to find the answer to my somewhat tricky pattern of the day which ended up being add 1, add 2 and repeat. So their problem looked similar to 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, etc.. For the main lesson we went over how to write a number in expanded form. So for example the students learned that to write 473 in expanded form means to write 400+70+3= 473. This concept really helps students understand place value and that when reading a number you really are just putting together the digits in each place from the ones to hundreds in order to create a number. 

Colorful Tile Day

Yet another day has gone by really fast. The students worked really hard today and we got through a lot of material in math. The day started off with the Daily Language Review again and the students turned them in for their weekly grade. We have been working on using an apostrophe for showing possession, so that was a main component of the DLR. As far as math goes,  the objectives for lesson 83 were to learn how to read and draw fractional parts of a set. The kids had a wonderful time today using square colored tiles to learn about fractional parts of a set. We talked about how the different colors in the tiles represented certain fractions up through sixths. So the students had the opportunity to have some fun with manipulatives while learning fractions at the same time!