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.