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.

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.