Not a Minute Wasted!
We have finished another awesome week in second grade! I am impressed with the way students are speeding up transitioning from one activity to the next. They are helping me maximize our instructional time by quickly following directions and remembering our rituals and routines.
Reading: This week we finished the beginning of the year reading, phonics, and spelling assessments, so we were able to begin our literacy centers! The students moved through reading, writing, phonics, word study, and technology centers flawlessly! Everyone was focused on their assignments and produced some creative work. In reading the students picked out “Just Right Books” and wrote reading responses about their favorite characters. The students had to provide evidence from the book to explain their thinking. At our phonics center, the students focused on the long and short “a” sound. This was a review for the students, so that they could spend more time learning the expectations of that center. Check your child’s gold homework folder to see their long “a”, short “a” word sort. We will continue with the same vocabulary words next week at our word study center: straight, collars, row, stood, floppy, curly, drooled, and weighed. The students explored Highlights Magazine online at our technology center. Reading on this website at home can count for the students’ 20 minutes of reading! At our writing center, the students wrote about something they did this summer or a day they spent with a special friend. I will use a rubric to analyze these writing samples and decide what each writer needs to learn next!
Check out this awesome story Max H. wrote using all 8 of our vocabulary words! Second grade writers are encouraged to add a lot of details to their writing!
Math: This week we learned the word equivalent and talked about things that are equivalent, or equal, in the world around us. We can say the number 10, or we can say a dozen minus 2! The students worked on greater than, less than, and equal to problems. Finding patterns in strings of numbers was reviewed this week. Can you find the patterns in these numbers: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30? You could say the pattern goes up by fives, or that the digits in the one’s place go 5, 0, 5, 0. One of the challenges this week was our broken calculator problems. The students were asked to pretend a button on the calculator was broken, and had to work without it. For example, the nine on your calculator is broken, how can you display the number 9 without pushing the 9 button? The students were very creative as they worked out different solutions on their calculators: “You can do 8 + 1, or 4 +5.” “You can hit 3 x 3!”
Here are some fun games that help students practice the broken calculator problems!
http://www.mathsisfun.com/games/broken-calculator.html
http://www.transum.org/Software/SW/Starter_of_the_day/Students/Broken_Calculator.asp
Next week, we will complete Math Unit 1 and take our Unit 1 assessment. Watch your child’s backpack for a math review packet. If your child is in my math class, you will also find their speed drill graph in their gold folder. If they have Mrs. D for math check their blue math folder for the speed drill graph. This graph shows your child’s progress on the one minute addition or subtraction speed drills.
I’m looking forward to another awesome week!Thank you for all of your great support at home! 🙂 This week’s raffle ticket winners were: Yehuda Leib, Ari, Jacob E., Eli, and Brielle!
Coming Soon:
Sight word study lists,
First in Math passwords and logins,
RazKids passwords and logins,
Reading logs,
and Spelling lists!
