Beth's 2nd & 3rd Grade Class

 Over the last month, the children have been working hard at developing a deeper sense of numbers and gaining a solid understanding of the change in magnitude as numbers move from 1’s, to 10’s, to 100’s. The students have also been working with the ability to leap mentally from number to number while estimating and figuring the results of various operations with ease. Work Place activities are available to reinforce place value concepts. One game has children counting various sums of coins; two others involve estimating weight and quantity and then counting in 10’s and 1’s to check the estimates.

 We get together with our younger buddies every Friday and do a variety of activities. Our buddies are in Kari’s and Molly’s class and they are right down the hall. Older buddies love the chance to go back to Pre-K and play with their things, like play-dough, house, the loft and large building blocks. Last week we wrote movies together and will finish them after break.

“What’s the mystery?”
“What clues have you found?”
“Who is on your suspect list?”

Questions fill the air as the 2/3 Book Clubs meet in small groups to discuss their current mystery books. Whether they are reading about Cam Jansen, Jigsaw Jones, or Encyclopedia Brown, they are learning that there are some common features of the mystery genre. Readers of mysteries need to read closely paying attention to clues, suspects, and false clues. Using their Detective Notebooks to keep track of their thinking, students come to their discussion group to share ideas and hunches—and solve crimes!
 

 We are coming to the end of our second grade geometry unit that focuses on exploring shapes, symmetry, area, and number. Throughout this unit the students have used geoblocks, pattern blocks, geoboards, and paper shapes to investigate 2- and 3- dimensional shapes, symmetry, fractions, area, similarity, congruence, tessellation, and transformations. In the upcoming week, we will be focusing on different types of triangles, thinking about and classifying shapes in order to write about and describe them accurately, using various strategies for solving longer computation problems and understanding growing patters of number.

 Third grade mathematicians have just finished our exploration of multiplication and division. We ended the unit by applying multiplication skills to solve for area. We covered our notebooks and other material in the classroom. We thought about different units of measure and places in the world to use those units, such as square yards to measure a football field. We used different rectangles of paper to create multiplication number sentences and compared them to other rectangles, further exploring the associative property of multiplication; using one expression to help solve another problem such as 2 X 8 and 5 X 8 to solve for 7 X 8. We will continue learning multiplication facts at home and during Work Places while we move on into our next unit.

 Children are enjoying the opportunity to be scientists on Friday afternoons while we study the theme of light, sight, and color. The students enjoyed experimenting with mixing colors, creating secret messages using reflections in a mirror and creating a kaleidoscope with the use of multiple mirrors. Children discovered that black ink is actually made of a blend of other colors including red, yellow and blue. The different colors of ink are made by different kinds of molecules, which spread out as water carries them up a filter. Some kids extended the activity by testing other colored markers!

Second Grade Math

 What do we care passionately about in our world—in our class, our playground, our neighborhood, our community? And what are some things that we would like to change? These are the questions we have been asking ourselves as we read a variety of persuasive writing pieces in books, poems, speeches, and stories. Then we have been making lists and writing short pieces in our new Writers Notebooks! We have been noticing what writers do when they feel passionately about a topic and want to convince others to take action. Soon we will be writing to convince each other how we should spend our GSPS money.

Every day for the past few weeks the 2/3 classrooms have been bustling with activity, as each student takes on a role in our Postal Service. The highlight of the time is when the mail is finally delivered to our classroom. The students are eager to see who has written them a letter! They have discovered that if they write letters to others they are more likely to get a letter back. We have been learning what to put in a letter, how to format a friendly letter, and how to address an envelope. Letters from our Little Buddies are a particular hit.