Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
Conferences are December 7th and 8th - the conference manager opens Monday December 4th at 6am. Our evening of Giving and Gathering is on Wednesday December 13th at 5:30 pm. Choir students, please meet in the Music room at 5:15pm
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Sometimes when helping students spell words, you don't realize what you're writing. I can honestly say, that's the first time I've written this phrase on a white board. Ha!
Oral storytelling around the fire was an important part of the First Nations traditions. We are practicing that tradition with stories around the fire in our classroom. While listening to The Legend of the White Buffalo Woman, students were recording things they learned about the First Nations people. We were looking for ideas under the following categories: Home, clothing, food, traditions, symbols, and tools. We have large charts posted in our classroom where we are posting all of our observations about the First Nations. You will see them when you come in for interviews.
Along the topic of bison and communities in the past, we are also reading Buffalo Before Breakfast from Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Treehouse series. The students don't know it yet, but the White Buffalo Woman makes an appearance in this story too! The Grade 2 classes began an exciting new project this week called Storyteller's Workshop. Starting with the idea that everyone has a story to tell, students have been writing up a storm! This week began with students writing for the purpose of entertaining the reader. Their stories could be made up or something from their real life. We had stories about a Mom who forgot her coffee on the roof of the car, Minecraft, finding $5.00 in a parking lot and we can't certainly can't forget the story about Mrs. Bradley eating so much pizza that she exploded. Our classroom was filled with writing and laughter. Our writing got a little bit more challenging when students were asked to write with the purpose of teaching someone something. Most students chose to teach the reader about themselves by writing about their family or past. One student described her bedroom in excellent detail, right down to the polka dot curtains. Another student wrote about being born in Fort McMurray and many students wrote about their Elf on the Shelf arriving. A very special part of our storyteller's workshop is sharing our stories. We gather around the fire and students take turns sharing what they've wrote. Students also take turns providing the reader with "Kind Feedback" and "Helpful Feedback". It truly is a magical part of our morning. Our storyteller's workshops will continue over the next few weeks as we practice writing for different purposes.
The big number line challenge! Students were given an envelope of numbers, a quick lesson on number lines and sent off to complete the following challenge: There were 5 different groups who came up with 5 different strategies on how to place their numbers. The only thing that all the groups did the same was put 50 in the middle. But even with 5 different strategies, all of the groups successfully completed the challenge. Ask your child which part of the challenge they found harder, putting the numbers in place, or working as a group to solve the challenge? After our number line challenge, students were introduced to the term, "benchmarks". Everyone agreed that benchmarks make number lines easier to read and help us figure out where the numbers fit.
This week we've been practicing placing numbers on number lines with our school math specialist, Mrs. Gadicke. She's been challenging us with a great game that you can play at home: https://mathsframe.co.uk/en/resources/playgame/316 We used Rochelle Strauss' book, One Well: The Story of Water on Earth to learn about water distribution around the world. We simulated some of the situations in the book so student could see how fortunate we are to have an unlimited clean water supply. Although it seems like there is a lot of water on earth, we discovered that very little of it is available to use as drinking water. We learned that 1 billion people on earth have to walk 15 minutes to a clean source of drinking water. That's like walking for water for our entire recess! Students carried a 10kg jug of water around the classroom to get an idea of what some people have to do to get water. We got wet, we got tired and we made a mess. Overall, it was unpleasant and gave us all a good idea of how difficult it would be to do that every day. To represent water distribution around the world, we used cups to show how every country has access to different amounts of water. Students were shocked and felt it was unfair that not everyone had equal access to water like we do. Their feelings were a great lead into learning about the importance of Water Conservation.
We introduced number lines by building a number line that went from 0 to 80. Students then had discussions in their table group around the following questions: -What do I see on the number line? -What do I think this could be used for? -I wonder how this would help us? Students quickly noticed the numbers were grouped by 10s and that the number line would be a helpful tool for skip counting. We're applying our skip counting skills identify counting patterns on the number line.
Stay tuned. Next week students will be challenged with an exciting number line project in our classroom! We are continuing to build upon our descriptive writing skills by adding a new learning target to work on. This week we focused on the organization of our ideas. We discussed the importance of an opening sentence that gets the reader's attention and practiced ways to write that. We all agreed that a paragraph that had many sentences that started with "I see" or "I hear" or "I think" was pretty boring to read. But if a sentence began with, "Ahh! I screamed as the bison trampled past me!" it got the reader's attention and made them want to read more. We changed the writing process when we had students write on strips of colored paper. They wrote sentences from each category on a different colored strip of paper. This allowed students to rearrange their sentences and decide what order made the most sense and was the most interesting. The images for our descriptive writing were of bison and tipis as we are beginning to learn about the Prairies and the Blackfoot people as part of our Social Studies curriculum.
Over the last few weeks we have been learning about digraphs which are 2 letters that work together to make one sound. We have been "Word Detectives" searching through the books in our classroom to find examples of TH and CH words. On Monday, we read "Sheep in a Jeep" by Nancy E. Shaw and had to listen for examples of SH words. There is a series of the Sheep books and they all have great examples of digraphs in them. If you have any of these books at home, ask your child to be a "Word Detective" and search for the SH words. After finding 8 SH words, students were challenged to create a worksheet for one of their classmates. Using graph paper, they had to create "Word Frame" for each of the words. A word frame is where a box represents the letter and students have to figure out what letter goes in the box based on it's shape. ![]() Students had to take their time to make sure their boxes were the right shape for the letter. "Tall" letters such as h, t, l, and f needed a rectangle. "Small" letters such as s, o, a, and r needed a perfect square. "Basement" letters such as p and y needed a rectangle that went below the other letters. Students were so focussed on their word frames that you could hear a pin drop in our classroom! *Mrs. Bradley also thought this was important because students had to form their letters properly for them to fit in the box. A little bonus printing practice! 2, 4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate? The Grade 2s expanded on their knowledge of skip counting by 2s. We had a problem that involved counting bicycle tires and build upon our skills. We skip counted by 2s starting at many different numbers. We found the even numbers easier than odd numbers. However, we used a hundreds chart and found some patterns, which made skip counting easier. Students discovered that if the last digit in a number is even, the last digit in every number will be even. But if the last digit in the number is odd, the last digit in every number will be odd. We also noticed that the last digit is always 2, 4, 6, 8, or 0 if you're counting even numbers, or 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9 if you're counting odd numbers. Please practice this at home. Try giving your child a number and see if they can skip count to the next 6 numbers. Start simple, but try to challenge them too!
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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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