Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
We have been extremely busy this week building our model communities! There are lighthouses, grain elevators and igloos everywhere you look in our classroom. The first day we painted the background. Once that dried, we started building. And we just keep on building! Monday will be our last day of building...maybe...
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Students have been very excited to learn regrouping in Math! Many of them already knew how to do it and were happy to share what they knew with the class. We learned a little rhyme to help us remember the proper steps: You put your ones down low, You put your tens up high, You add them all together, It's as easy as pie!! We have practiced this using our whiteboards, practice sheets, a game called Race to 100, 12 sided dice and base ten blocks.
Summarizing a story sounds simple, but it's often challenging to explain an entire story in 2 to 3 sentences. This week we used a graphic organizer to help us collect our thoughts and explain the important ideas in a story. The graphic organizer we used helped us determine the important details of the story. We heard the entertaining story, Interrupting Chicken, and worked our way through the organizer as a group. Next week, students will be summarizing stories on their own using this format.
If you're reading at home with your child, ask them to tell you the important things that happen in the story. It's great practice to build reading comprehension. Over the past week we have had many conversations about the tragedy in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. I have been so proud of the thoughtfulness and maturity that my students have shown during these conversations. I had tears running down my cheeks on Friday that were a mixture of sadness for the victims and pride for the sincere gestures of goodwill that have come from the students in my class.
We have been reviewing some of the reading strategies we learned at the beginning of the year. Students have grown so much as readers this year that the strategies are being applied much differently than they were in September. One of the strategies we talked about was, "Good Readers Ask Questions." We made a page in our Visual Journals to help us remember all the questions that we could be asking. Then we watched the story The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires and practiced asking some of these questions. Finally, students took their lists to their Book Club group and applied these questions to their own reading.
In Math, we have learned 3 different ways to add two digit numbers. We tried each one, and then talked about which is the most efficient and works best for the task we're working on. Next week we will practice addition with regrouping and then move onto subtraction. One of the ways we practiced our 2 digit addition was to plan a weekend in Saskatoon. We had $75 to spend on food and $100 to spend on activities and we had to figure out what we would like to do. Many of the students asked if they could eat all of their meals at Tim Horton's so they didn't "waste" any money! There were some very entertaining conversations about this project.
Our Grade 2 class has been very busy building boats the past few weeks. We learned about the importance of a keel to stabilize a boat and keep it upright when we built cork boats. We built sailboats that were able to move using wind power. We also learned about paddle boats, like the S.S. Moyie at Heritage Park. We built our own paddle boats that were able to move though the water by themselves. As part of the building process, students have been recording their observations and reflecting on their building projects. The final project in our Boats and Buoyancy unit will begin later this week. Students will be applying all their knowledge about boats to make a boat of their own design.
The Grade 2s are very excited to start building Model Communities in Social Studies. Students have been partnered up and they have selected one of our Canadian Communities. They will demonstrate all that they've learned over the past months by making a model. Students have been asked to bring in cardboard for the base. We are providing many materials for the building process, however, students are welcome to bring in extras if they would like to add them to our model. Many students thought they might like to bring in plastic animals or people to add. First the students were given this scenario for their model: Then we discussed expectations for building and looked at some examples: The next step was to start researching about what we wanted to include in our model. Students went through their Notebooks and Visual Journals to review everything we've learned about the communities. They made notes about the land, the people, resources and "other". After the research, students got to work with their partners to start the planning process. They looked at the materials we have and started to think about how they could use these materials to represent their community. Students were asked to write down what they were going to build and what they were going to use to build it. Our planning sheets look like this: Once our planning is complete, we will start building. Everyone is very excited to begin! The building starts on Monday!
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!
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. |
AuthorMrs. Bradley's class is made up of 24 students from Dr. Roberta Bondar School. Archives
June 2018
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