Back from Spring Break

Once again the students and myself made it through a five day week after making up yet another day from missing school for State Basketball Tournament. We started the week off working on our April quilt squares and room hangers. The writing prompt for the quilt square this month was to write about your favorite Easter celebration. Many of the students  wrote about dyeing eggs and going on an Easter Egg hunt with their families. The second graders worked on turning their pieces to create an Easter basket shape for their quilt. Then they wrote their final draft paragraphs on a bunny shape to complete their quilt pieces. As for the hanger in the room, the students made little watering cans which around the edge said "April Showers Bring May Flowers". Hopefully we will get some gentle showers this April and less wind!

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. 

Another week has gone by fast

I apologize for not writing about what happened in the class yesterday. I have come down with some weird throat bug that has made my voice very raspy and minimal, so I took yesterday evening to lay down and get some rest. But here is a quick write-up about yesterday....

Our math lesson was quick as most of the morning we were giving the DIBLES test to the students. DIBELS is a literacy test given to the students at the beginning, middle and end of the year. If you want to find out more about DIBELS, click on the logo at the bottom of this post to be taken to the main website for the text. In reading yesterday, the second graders worked on a highlighting activity. The activity had the class highlighting the nouns in a short story and then re-writing the sentences adding adjectives to describe the nouns they had highlighted. The students came up with a lot of a great adjectives and we created a more interesting story by adding them to the nouns. For the rest of the day, the students just worked on their activities and workbook pages.

Regrouping and Catching Up

Today's lessons had the students really puzzled. For the first time ever, the second graders began their journey into learning subtraction with regrouping (those of you who are older would know this process as "borrowing") . The students used dimes and pennies to help them solve two-digit subtraction problems such as 56¢ - 12¢ = 44¢ and so on. The students did really well with the basic subtraction concepts but once we got to problems with regrouping, the students began to struggle. The main problem the students were trying to solve is 62¢ - 27¢ and the reminder to them was that we cannot take away 7 ones from 2 ones, so we had to regroup/borrow a ten from the 6 tens or 60 portion of 62. This concept was very tricky. but I will say that although most of the students still do not understand regrouping, many of them began to understand the concept without realizing they understood.