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.

Solids, Quotations and the tastiest Jalapeno Bagels

Since I have officially gotten into full day teaching, the grading has become more intense. From now on, I will only be posting what happens in the classroom weekly rather than every day. I start writing just a few things and end up with a huge post each day. Anyways, this week was quite the interesting one. First off in math this week, the students learned all about the geometric solids (cone, cube, sphere, cylinder, rectangular prism, and pyramid). We had a really fun time trying to figure out what kinds of shadows each of the shapes would make depending on which side the light was shown on. The students also learned about measuring using metric units, mainly centimeters. The students were able to understand this concept easily as they already had practice using the inches side of the ruler to measuring lengths of different objects. The last thing they learned in math was how to find the perimeter of an object by measuring and adding up each of the sides. We did an interesting activity where the students had to find the perimeter of their desks, the room and other objects in the room.