Happy 2017! I hope you had a wonderful winter break! Second graders hit the ground running this week with some fun mind stretching activities!
During "Encore," second graders were introduced to a fun picture book called Not a Box, by Antoinette Portis. In this playful story, a bunny is asked why he is doing different things with a box. His response - "It's not a box." His creativity and imagination have him pretending his box is a racecar, mountain top, and burning building among other things! After experiencing the story, students were then challenged to creat their own "not a box." The ideas the two teams came up with are awesome and they will work to complete a final product during "Encore" next week.
In math this week we worked with money! Students are doing a great job counting a collection of coins and writing the value in two ways - as cents (with the cent symbol) and in dollars and cents (with the dollar sign and decimal). After some fun whole group and small group practice, students then played a game called "What's a Word Worth." In this game, students are given a menu showing a monetary value for each letter in the alphabet. They then pull a challenge card which has them make a word according to a set criteria (who can make a 6 letter word with the least value). Once words are made and values have been calculated, the student whose word best matches the criteria wins the round!
During our reading / LA time, students started a fun unit called Weather Detectives. In this unit of study students will not only be learning about elements of the weather, but they will also be working to solve the mystery of who stole weather data from McGee's Weather Company! This week we talked about various elements of the weather and the weather tools used to measure these elements. We visited the computer where our school weather station collects weather data and started our own log of the weather. We also learned about our first suspect in the McGee's missing weather data case - Bob Blizzard. After reading about Bob, we determined he definitely has a motive for taking the weather data, so he will remain on our suspect list!
During "Encore," second graders were introduced to a fun picture book called Not a Box, by Antoinette Portis. In this playful story, a bunny is asked why he is doing different things with a box. His response - "It's not a box." His creativity and imagination have him pretending his box is a racecar, mountain top, and burning building among other things! After experiencing the story, students were then challenged to creat their own "not a box." The ideas the two teams came up with are awesome and they will work to complete a final product during "Encore" next week.
In math this week we worked with money! Students are doing a great job counting a collection of coins and writing the value in two ways - as cents (with the cent symbol) and in dollars and cents (with the dollar sign and decimal). After some fun whole group and small group practice, students then played a game called "What's a Word Worth." In this game, students are given a menu showing a monetary value for each letter in the alphabet. They then pull a challenge card which has them make a word according to a set criteria (who can make a 6 letter word with the least value). Once words are made and values have been calculated, the student whose word best matches the criteria wins the round!
During our reading / LA time, students started a fun unit called Weather Detectives. In this unit of study students will not only be learning about elements of the weather, but they will also be working to solve the mystery of who stole weather data from McGee's Weather Company! This week we talked about various elements of the weather and the weather tools used to measure these elements. We visited the computer where our school weather station collects weather data and started our own log of the weather. We also learned about our first suspect in the McGee's missing weather data case - Bob Blizzard. After reading about Bob, we determined he definitely has a motive for taking the weather data, so he will remain on our suspect list!