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.

Pair-of-lells and Love of Lightning

In math this week, we were able to read one of my favorite math books. It was called Sir Cumference  and the Great Knight of Angleland. The book was about a young boy named Radius who went on an adventure with his family medallion. Radius learned about all different types of angles as well as the basic words for them "right", "acute" and "obtuse". The students loved the book and were really able to understand the difference between angles thanks to the rhymes and symbols the book put them with. The main reason why we read the book however, was for its reference to parallel lines. In the book, the two-headed dragon radius fights stretches out its necks to create a bridge. The King of Angleland calls the dragon his "Pair-of-lells". The second graders understood what parallel lines were then, when we went back and did the lesson about parallel lines. It is such a wonderful book and I would suggest any of the Sir Cumference math books to use with your students.

How Big is a Foot?

Today was yet another cold day at the school with temperatures around -12 to 6 degrees throughout the day. The students were bundled up and made it safely to school. We began the day as usual with DLR and then the students worked on their spelling packets while I went around the room and answered questions. Today's math lesson was really fun! We learned about how to measure in not only inches but feet as well. I drew a bunch of lines on the board and had the students answer questions about how long each line was in feet and in inches. The students also saw the connection between inches to feet and multiplication, such as 2 feet is 24 inches (12 x 2=24). In their small groups, the students then were asked to measure certain objects around the room and tell me about how long their object was in feet and inches. The students measured the height of the trashcan, length of the bookcase, length of their desks, height of the door and more! Finally to conclude the lesson we lined up 11 rulers on the floor and the students each walked heal to heal beside the rulers to see about how long their "foot" is compared to the 12 inches "foot".