Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
We had our very first edition of, "My teacher is a Science Creature!" this week. All of the Grade 2 students rotated through the Grade 2 classrooms to see an exciting demonstration about Buoyancy. Ask your child what they learned from their Science Creatures! Hint: My demonstration had to do with a floating egg!
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We have been practicing our basic addition and subtraction facts almost every day. Our goal is to know them quickly so it becomes automatic. We play a lot of dice games using Mrs. Bradley's "Math Tool Kit". Here are some of the dice we use: We have also been doing a lot of problem solving. Students are learning how to read a problem carefully to figure out what it's asking them to do. Students are asked to show their work and write a complete sentences explaining their answer. Here are some of the problems we did this week:
Ms. Gerrish’s class had 16 bags of popcorn for Fun Snack. Mrs. Bradley’s class had 20 bags of popcorn and Ms. Bell’s class had 12 bags of popcorn. How many bags of popcorn were passed out to the Grade 2 students altogether? Show all of your thinking. How many more bags of popcorn did Mrs. Bradley’s class have than Ms. Bell’s? Show all of your thinking. Cohen had 16 trading cards in his collection. He gave some cards to Muath. Now Cohen has 9 cards in his collection. How many cards did he give to Muath? Show your thinking. Our writing project this week was to learn how to write instructions on how to do something. we started out by writing instructions for Mrs. Bradley on how to peel a banana. It had entertaining results! Students quickly learned that their instructions needed a lot of specific details and steps. They needed to think hard about what is the very first thing you do when you peel a banana. We thought of some things we needed to add to our instructions and eventually ended up with a peeled banana! After Mrs. Bradley got banana all over her, we tried giving instructions to a partner on how to draw a picture. There was a lot of laughter around the room during this project. Students quickly figured out that their instructions needed to be very detailed. If there wasn't enough detail in the instructions, this would happen: Our final task was to take everything we learned and write instructions on how to play Headbands. (Headbands is our new favorite Math game.) Our instructions on how to play Headbands will be on display during conferences.
We were very fortunate to have had the Canadian Geographic floor map of Canada at our school last week. It was so large, that it filled our entire Launch Pad! We took the opportunity to learn about places around Canada, talk about the distances from Calgary to the 3 communities we've been studying and get to know Canada a little better. We started our lesson by trying to see if we could all fit in Hudson's Bay. We didn't. But we found Churchill, Manitoba, which is famous for the polar bears that live there. Once we got a few reference points like North, South, East and West, students were off to explore Canada on their Scavenger Hunt! Some of the highlights of our exploring:
-Discovering Halifax was farther away from Calgary than Iqaluit. -Finding a place called Tuktoyuktuk. -Learning about the 5 lakes that are so big, they're called the Great Lakes. -Naming islands from Canada's north. -Finding a place called Cow's Head in Newfoundland. (And that Mrs. Bradley has been there!) -Finding so many lakes in Canda. The Grade 2 classes have started their Boats and Buoyancy unit in Science. And what a start it has been! We started the week testing items to see if they could float or sink. We made predictions and then we started testing our items and recording our observations. There were a number of surprises when some items floated when students thought they would sink! After discovered which items floated and which items sank, the next step was to learn why. We watched a Bill Nye the Science Guy video to learn all about Buoyancy. As always, Bill Nye explains things in way that is easy to understand, funny, and entertaining! Once we understood that items that were buoyant could float, we moved onto a Design Challenge. Students were given a ball of plasticine and had to create an object that sunk and an object that floated. Students quickly realized the Design Challenge was harder than it looked. Making plasticine sink was easy, but getting it to float took some careful focus and finger work. We applied our building skills one more time with another Design Challenge using tin foil. Students were asked to do the same task, design an object that could float and an object that could sink but using tin foil. This time, the tricky part was an object that could sink! Here are some of the designs students tried: Random fact from Grade 2: When you have 24 students with their hands in tubs of water, you use 2 Costco sized rolls of Bounty Paper towels in 3 days! If anyone would like to donate a roll of paper towels to our classroom, we would appreciate it.
We are heading into a big learning adventure! Our Trickster residency is next week. We will be spending the week creating a showpiece to share with our families and the other students at Dr. Roberta Bondar School.
The week will be different from our usually schedule and routine. Each day we will have some time to work with our Trickster, and we will be creating a drama performance about traveling across the Arctic in a kayak. Our performance will be on Thursday evening from 7:00 to 8:00. Families are asked to arrive 15 minutes before the show and drop students off in their classrooms. It will be an exciting week full of new experiences! If your child gets very excited when you say the word there, their or they're, it's because they've been working hard all week trying to learn how to use these words correctly! We started our week learning about homophones, and then we focused on their, there and they're. We practiced using these words in many different ways this week. First we used them in sentences with a partner, then we practiced finding them in sentences on a practice sheet. Then we had to be "Word Detectives" and find them in a chapter book. We also kept track of how often Mrs. Bradley said there, they're or their and created a tally chart. (Which was a lot!!) During our silent reading time, students were searching for these words and if they found one in a book, and could tell Mrs. Bradley which one it was, they got to add a Superstar to our jar. Finally, we had to show Mrs. Bradley how well we understood there, their and they're by completing an Exit Slip. (An exit slip is like a quiz).
Try using there, their or they're in a sentence and ask your child to define it! This week we began to learn about making singular nouns into plural nouns. We quickly discovered this was tricky because there are different rules for different word endings! Some words are easy, you just add an S. But if the word ends in SS, X or CH, you need to add ES. We practiced with a lot of different words, trying to remember the rules about ES or S. We're going to keep working on this next week and continue to learn about the words that break the rules.
This week we have added another strategy to help us learn our basic facts. We have taken a hammer to our numbers to "break them apart" and make them into 10s. We learned that making numbers into 10s makes it easier to solve in our heads. We now have a number of strategies to help us learn our basic facts.
Here they are: -Doubles -Monkey in the middle -Doubles plus one or Near doubles -Making 10 -Fact families Ask your child which of these strategies they use the most. Our latest "Teacher Read" book is Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat. Farley Mowat is a Canadian author who has written many books about life in Canada. Owls in the Family is about a boy in Saskatchewan who has many unusual pets, including owls. Our Social Studies curriculum includes learning about prairie communities. In listening to the adventures of a boy with gophers and owls for pets, our class is learning all about life in rural Saskatchewan!
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AuthorMrs. Bradley's class is made up of 24 students from Dr. Roberta Bondar School. Archives
June 2018
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