Growing Plants and Learning 4 Facts

This last week started off with something different as we went to see the Jr. High's play/musical rehearsal. They were performing Seussical Jr. a play with the story line of Horton Hears a Who but with other Dr. Seuss characters. The students became very excited about the play and I believe some of them went to see the actual performance on Wednesday night. As far as the classroom goes, the students started a new unit in science this week all about Plants. We started off discussing what the essential resources are that a plant needs to live and grow. These elements are air, water, sunlight and soil. We also talked about the parts of a plant and what they do to help bring in nutrients around the plant to allow them to grow. The students were very excited about this unit because they get to actually grow some different plants and observe them over the three week period. The students are doing an experiment to see whether beans will germinate the fastest in total sunlight, some sunlight, or no sunlight at all. They are also watching how Spider plants grow roots just by sitting in water. Next week the students will be planting more tiny seeds and observing how they sprout and grow.

Back from Spring Break

Once again the students and myself made it through a five day week after making up yet another day from missing school for State Basketball Tournament. We started the week off working on our April quilt squares and room hangers. The writing prompt for the quilt square this month was to write about your favorite Easter celebration. Many of the students  wrote about dyeing eggs and going on an Easter Egg hunt with their families. The second graders worked on turning their pieces to create an Easter basket shape for their quilt. Then they wrote their final draft paragraphs on a bunny shape to complete their quilt pieces. As for the hanger in the room, the students made little watering cans which around the edge said "April Showers Bring May Flowers". Hopefully we will get some gentle showers this April and less wind!

Bees and The Cool Crazy Crickets Club

This week the students learned many new interesting facts, mostly about bees. As it turns out, many of the activities and lessons this week had information about bees and what they do inside their hives. Together, we did an active reading lesson about bees using an article called Another Buzz for Bees, which discussed how bees are able to find flowers more easily if their nectar contains caffeine. This was a very difficult text, but I was quite impressed with how well the students were able to decode the main points in the article. Later in the week, we read a weekly reader that also was about bees which talked about how they make honey, and about their life cycle. The students were asked to work on using what they know about bees to answer questions and write a paragraph with their main idea, details and conclusion. The second graders seemed to really enjoy learning about bees as many of them did not like them. Now that they know more about bees and why they are important (mainly for helping flowers grow), they have more positive attitudes towards them.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Just wanted to say Happy Saint Patrick's Day to all of the families of my second grade students! Since we had school today I can write about some things we did in the classroom. In math today, the students talked about representing equal groups by drawing pictures. They are very excited about learning multiplication and this strategy of drawing a picture to help you sort groups is very helpful. In reading we began a chapter book called The Cool Crazy Crickets, which talked about a group of young students who created their own club. We worked on summarizing events and characters in the story and the students also were able to write about what they though the story meant to them, or how they could connect with it. We worked on revising our rough drafts in our writers notebook and the revision strategy we used was  adding more details. The students worked together in their color notebook groups to revise each others papers. I was very impressed by the amount of work some of the students put into revising other student's papers. What a wonderful collaboration between partners.

A Simple Short Week

Well the ladies made it to state in basketball with their victories at regionals so this week was cut short. We have Thursday and Friday off this week so the students were only here today and yesterday. Even though it was a short week though, we still got a lot accomplished. The students still took their spelling test this week on Wednesday and we went over some more math. The best part about this week though was that we have finally begun our writing genre studies. The students received their own Writer's Notebook in which they can write their drafts and pre-writing. This week we focused on learning about Narrative paragraphs. We began by reading a story called Gloria from The Stories Julian Tells. We then discussed what components of a paragraph make a great narrative. The students actually came up with everything I wanted them to know such as it tells about an event in your own life, uses I, we, us and is in sequential order (first, next, then, last). The students were able to do their first pre-writing activity and complete their first rough draft before the week ended. I am really excited about the writing notebooks and I think the students are too!

Basketball and Pizza Shop Goodness

What an exciting week it was at Briggsdale this week. The whole school was getting pumped up for the high school girls as they made their way to the regional championship in basketball. Many of the second graders were really excited about the pep rally we had on Thursday this week. The students were also very excited about a new fraction game I found called Tony's Pizza Shop. It is an interactive game we played together to help the students understand fraction simplification and also mixed number relationships. The game can be found in my games page of the website if you wish to play the game at home with your student. So speaking of fractions, that is the portion of the unit we discussed in math this week. The students had a really hard time with mixed numbers the first day they were taught them. I had them working as tables using pattern blocks to find a whole (hexagon shape) and its parts (triangle, parallelogram and trapezoid). After the Pizza Shop game the next day though, the students practically had it mastered. I am very proud of them for working so hard to understand the math this week as it can be a bit tricky.

Pair-of-lells and Love of Lightning

In math this week, we were able to read one of my favorite math books. It was called Sir Cumference  and the Great Knight of Angleland. The book was about a young boy named Radius who went on an adventure with his family medallion. Radius learned about all different types of angles as well as the basic words for them "right", "acute" and "obtuse". The students loved the book and were really able to understand the difference between angles thanks to the rhymes and symbols the book put them with. The main reason why we read the book however, was for its reference to parallel lines. In the book, the two-headed dragon radius fights stretches out its necks to create a bridge. The King of Angleland calls the dragon his "Pair-of-lells". The second graders understood what parallel lines were then, when we went back and did the lesson about parallel lines. It is such a wonderful book and I would suggest any of the Sir Cumference math books to use with your students.

A Carousel Food Web for Unwanted Kings

This week went by fast as we did a lot of review and practice in English. The class finished working with quotation marks and then moved onto review of alphabetical order and capitalization. The students also were able to finish their George Washington biographies they had started a while back. I was very impressed with how much detail some of the students put into their biographies. In reading, we read the story Carousel and discussed how it was related to the other stories in the unit. The students decided that Carousel was like the other stories because in each one, some type of object or food was created. In this story, a young girl received a hand made carousel from her father for her birthday.

Solids, Quotations and the tastiest Jalapeno Bagels

Since I have officially gotten into full day teaching, the grading has become more intense. From now on, I will only be posting what happens in the classroom weekly rather than every day. I start writing just a few things and end up with a huge post each day. Anyways, this week was quite the interesting one. First off in math this week, the students learned all about the geometric solids (cone, cube, sphere, cylinder, rectangular prism, and pyramid). We had a really fun time trying to figure out what kinds of shadows each of the shapes would make depending on which side the light was shown on. The students also learned about measuring using metric units, mainly centimeters. The students were able to understand this concept easily as they already had practice using the inches side of the ruler to measuring lengths of different objects. The last thing they learned in math was how to find the perimeter of an object by measuring and adding up each of the sides. We did an interesting activity where the students had to find the perimeter of their desks, the room and other objects in the room.

Write on His Profile

Since it is starting to snow and my internet is becoming slower, I will write a rather small bit about today's work in the second grade classroom. We began the day as usual and then worked on an aw/au vowel sounds worksheet which had the students completing a word search for spelling vocabulary. This was rather difficult for many of the students as the "aught" portion of many words stumps the students. Daughter, naughty, and caught are just some of the words the students worked with this morning. Most of the day was spent completing the Reading Theme 4 Test and editing/revising our biographies about Abraham Lincoln. Many of the students were able to revise their draft and begin writing their final draft. Since the Lincoln biographies are part of our monthly quit project, the students wrote their final draft on a white profile of Abraham Lincoln (similar to the picture on the right). I was very and I mean very impressed by how hard the students worked to get things done today, especially with their biographies.

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. 

Snowy Day Back

Not too much to report for today. Since we missed Friday's class we did a lot of make-up work today as well as finish the Abraham Lincoln biographies. It has been really windy all day with the snow blowing in our faces as we exit the school. We started a very fun graphing activity today about what students will miss most about winter and what they look forward to in spring. Other than make up work and the usual math lessons, today wasn't too exciting.

Although in science we did play a really fun predator vs. prey game that taught the students what happens in live situations with animals. We really got the full experience of living in different climates as we walked through the blowing snow to another building on school grounds to play the game. Since it was so cold, we talked about fur, shelter and big feet as adaptations animals in cold weather environment need. I am hoping the wind stops tonight as I really do not want another snow day tomorrow. The students are going to be starting an exciting timeline biography project tomorrow and I want them to have as much time as possible to work on it. Sorry I did not write more than this today, I am quite tired from grading and the snow on top of an upset stomach leads me to feeling tired and ready for bed!

Till tomorrow, have a wonderful night everyone!

-Laura Hill

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 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.

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!

First Day of Student Teaching

What a quick first day of student teaching it was today. It seemed like the day went by really fast as we went through our scheduled lessons. First up we went over some basic teach-to’s on what to do when you answer a question (raise your hand, don’t blurt it out) and how to line up (no talking, single file, be respectful). Then we began our day with the Daily Language Review (DLR) and also went over the math written on the meeting board. The students did a wonderful job working on the math meeting board and had some great questions regarding the problem of the day. We went over the meeting board answers and found out that the temperature this morning was 1°F which to the students is “very cold”!

Welcome to Teaching "Tails"

I am excited to announce that I will be starting this blog tomorrow with my first day of student teaching! I decided to call my educational blog Teaching "Tails" as I absolutely love whales and will be sharing many tales about my teaching experiences on the blog... plus it is a fun homophone to use with my students. I love to paint as well and I feel that each student I will have in my future classes is like a color, each very unique with qualities that create an excellent masterpiece of art. My wish for my students is for them to enjoy learning and be successful in everything they thrive to do.