English Language Arts - How do you find the perfect pet?
Math - What strategies can I use to help me solve addition problems?
Science - How can I classify objects?
P.E. - What different ways can I jump rope?
Music - How do rhythms help me remember things?
As you can see, we had a very thought-provoking week in Room 106. Since it is still the beginning of the school year, I wanted to give a couple of brief summaries for our different curriculum for the week.
English Language Arts - We are piloting a new program called "California Journeys" during this school year. We started this week off with the first story in this program, which for 2nd grade is "Henry and Mudge." Many of the students found this story to be a lot of fun to read. (As a little plug for reading time, there are quite a few books in this series and it would be a good place to start if you and your child are looking for something fun to read together.) With our new program we have access to many online resources, including audio recordings of each of our stories, which the students were able to hear during our center time this week.
Math - Our focus on math this week has been on Addition Strategies. We started by talking about different ways to make 10 and each child made a visual using hands to represent the different addition combinations to get to 10. We also worked quite a bit with some dominoes. In discussing the commutative property in addition (or the idea that the two numbers in an addition problem can be read either way to get the same answer), the class had some dominoes and wrote it as one problem and then flipped it around to show the other problem using the same numbers. Part of our study with the commutative property dealt with talking about how we can "flip" the numbers to different positions. So the class designed their own pair of flip-flops with two different addition problems using the same set of numbers. (These will be hanging in our classroom for Back-to-School Night.)
Domino Math
Science - The students this week were given bags with random objects in it and they had to decide how they were going to sort and classify their objects. Within our class we had people sorting by shape, color, size, length, weight, flexibility, and texture. The fun part about this one was that there wasn't any correct way to sort the objects, and actually it was interesting to see the variety of ways the kids saw the objects in different classifications. With this the students also had to classify other objects in a more specific way. The students had to decide which of the objects were "Easiest to hardest bend," "Hardest to softest," and "Roughest to Smoothest" and then write and draw about it in their science journals. Check out some of the scientists in our classroom.
Roughest to Smoothest
P.E. - We have started some basics of learning how to jump rope. As a class we discovered that it wasn't just about turning a rope. We practiced regular jumps, hopping on one foot, jumping forward and backward, and jumping side-to-side. We even had some students who wanted an extra challenge and tried a double bounce with a spin at the end. Within the next couple of weeks we should start to see some real progress with jumping rope.
Music - Our class does a weekly music lesson every Monday afternoon. Since I majored in Music Education, I like to bring this into our regular classroom. Each of the students got to say their name in a fun rhythm so that it helps their classmates remember their name. I think saying the name rhythms has definitely helped with that and has also made our classroom a tighter community.
Clearly, we have had a great week! I hope everyone has a great weekend.
*Just a Reminder - Back-to-School Night is Thursday, September 22nd at 5:45 in the Cafeteria. Our classroom presentation will be from 6:00 - 6:30. Hope to see you all there!*
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