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.

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.

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!