In second grade we started the year off with an engineering design challenge. Students read the book, How Full Is Your Bucket for Kids and discussed how we all carry around an invisible bucket. When our bucket is full, we feel good. When our bucket empties, we feel bad. We set a goal to be bucket fillers throughout the year and then began our design challenge to help us with this goal.
Here is an example of the design brief!
Here is an example of the design brief!
Magic Squares with Doubles & Doubles +1
In math this week, we looked at the sum of two identical addends - or doubles! After playing a quick review game, students were challenged to put together some magic squares using doubles and then doubles +1. Here is an example...can you put the smaller squares together to make a bigger square where every side of a little square that touches another square's side is a match?
Chugga, Chugga, Choo! Choo! All Aboard to the Punctuation Station!
This week we started a journey aboard the "Punctuation Train." We started at "Punctuation Station" and traveled to "Period Peak." While visiting "Period Peak" this week, we explored declarative sentences. We defined what a declarative sentence is, described the things declarative sentences do (tell facts, information, directions, etc), determined what punctuation mark should come at the end of a declarative sentence, and even brainstormed some of our own! Next, students went on a hunt for declarative sentences in their book box books! Finally, we participated in a sentence "snowball" search. MANY "snowballs" (strips of paper balled up) were placed at the center of the room. Some contained questions, some were declarative sentences, and some weren't even sentences at all (they were fragments)! Oh, and NONE of the snowballs had ending punctuation :-) Students visited the "snowball pile" and retrieved a snowball. As a team, they determined if their snowball was a sentence, and if it was, was it a declarative sentence. If so, teams kept those snowballs. If not, they threw the snowballs back into the pile. After a few minutes, we stopped and counted to see how many snowballs each team had in their pile that matched the criteria (was a declarative sentence). Declarative sentences were used to create a poster and periods were added to all sentences.