Tests, Tests Everywhere- Farklempt, Quarters and More!

The week has once again flown by rather quickly as we come to Friday of this week. Today was quite a long day for the students as they had to take three different tests today. Their first test was of course the weekly spelling test which takes place on Friday. My spelling group had some very difficult challenge words such as farklempt (which came from a book we read). If you don't know what farklempt is.. Why not go look it up right now and find out? The students had to use their challenge words to create their own sentences using each word per sentence. The students seemed to understand the words and did a nice job overall on the unit 20 spelling test. As for the other two tests, one was in reading and the third was the last of the ed performance tests. Since this week was the wrap up of unit 4, the students took their reading test about the animals unit. The test involved multiple choice, cause and effect charts and writing a two paragraph research topic. The main readings in the test were about spiders, which excited many of the students since they knew a lot about spiders already.

Mighty Regrouping Dinosaurs

It was a very challenging Wednesday for the students today. During our math time, the students once again visited the new realm of two-digit subtraction using regrouping. This time I showed the students another way to count numbers and regroup using base ten blocks. The students were given some subtraction problem examples and we would work through the regrouping process as a class. This is a brand new concept to the students so they once again had a very tough time figuring it out. I will say that I am very proud for how hard the second graders worked during math yesterday. We were doing math for a long time to just keep practicing. I could really start to see improvement and some "light bulbs" go off in the students throughout the day. Towards the end of the day, I had a one-on-one conference with many of the students to go over regrouping and sure enough many of them had figured out regrouping and were able to do some problems on their own with guidance!! I couldn't be more happier when each student had their breakthrough with regrouping subtraction. Now the key is for me to keep letting the students practice so that they will all have regrouping mastered. It is going to take quite some time for that, but it is a goal I know the students can reach.

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.