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!

In math this week, the students learned about probability or describing the likely hood of an event. This is a difficult concept to understand, but the second graders seemed to catch on to it quite fast. We also worked on creating and labeling arrays, which deals highly with multiplication. The students were able to work in groups to find the rows by columns of different garden vegetables on some activity sheets and write a number sentence for the arrays. This is now going to be a wonderful strategy for students to use to find out the product of some multiplication questions by drawing a picture.

For reading, we read a story called The Art Lesson which talked about a young boy wanting to become an artists. This was a great connection to writing as Tomie dePaola wrote both of the stories we read for these subjects. The students were then able to go back and make connections between the story and write summaries on them as well. They made some compare and contrast moments and used what they learned about persuasive writing to create their own paragraphs.

We finished the Pilgrims and Thirteen Colonies unit this week with the last of the group rotations and the students watching a film from BOCES about what the colonial states look like today.