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.