I will be out of the building Thursday, but there will be a math test on Metric Measurement when I return. I will gage how the students are doing on their work when I return to decide whether to give the test Friday or Monday. The test will include measurement word problems, measuring items using centimeters and meters, and comparing objects of different lengths.
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This week we will be having our Benchmark Math Assessment. This assessment is sort of like a semester exam. It tells us what our students have retained since the beginning of the year and what are they still struggling with. It will be a two part assessment, half on Thursday and half on Friday. Things to watch out for on this assessment: bar models, adding/ subtracting with regrouping, word problems, multiplication/ division, and ordering numbers. Extra practice is still up on my homework site, as well as, through ST Math. If you are looking for even more online practice IXL.com is a great place to practice math facts and word problems. The site only allows you so many practice questions a day, but if you are looking to invest in an online program that does higher and lower level math work, it's pretty ideal.
PBL Update: Our water presentations are up on the PBL site, as well as, pictures from our STEM challenge from this past Friday. This is a new activity that I am hoping to incorporate weekly. STEM challenges are great for creative and out of the box thinking, as well as, developing teamwork and critical thinking skills. If you like to volunteer to help out with these challenges (since they do get quite messy) please let me know. Thanks! I have become kind of a hoarder of pictures. In these photos you will see a few things. Back before break, we participated in the Hour of Code, which went extremely well. The kids loved building basic code and many even completed the first game, Frozen, and moved on to harder games. Something else pictured below are our brand new iPads. We are finally one-to-one! The kids are so pleased and have already personalized them during free choice time. Finally, the attached video is of what we call our "brain break." Many volunteers have seen this in action, but it happens in the morning between Word Study and PBL or Writing. We take about five minutes to do something fun and to wake up our brains a little bit, such as follow along to a Just Dance video on Youtube. Book Bag Announcement:
I will be ending the official book bag program. The reason for this is that very few students are participating in the program. Students are still allowed to borrow books from the classroom library anytime and use their book bags, but I will not be requiring students to trade out books to take home. If you have any classroom books at home that your child is not reading, please return them when you can, so that other students may read those texts. Thank you! Just FYI we have a math test on basic multiplication and division strategies this coming Friday. This assessment is not about knowing your quick facts, but how to solve the problem in different ways. I have videos here with basic strategies that have been taught, as well as resources on the homework page. Thanks!
You guys are amazing! I cannot describe how yesterday made me feel. I appreciate all the hard work that you've puti so far this year, helping me out in the classroom and being so generous with your time in general. Queen Anne is a radical place and every week this community surprises me. I am so thankful to have you guys supporting me for my first year here. I cannot imagine what this semester would have been like without you. I cannot wait to dig into my wish list and find amazing things at Target. I also cannot wait to eat all of the chocolate! Thank you so much and I hope your holidays are as amazing as mine have been so far. Quick Teacher Note: Progress reports went home yesterday with the kiddos. Please check their backpacks for that as well as a fun winter break reading challenge.
Make sure you check your kiddos backpack for their math tests from this week. One is our Unit 4 Bar Modeling test. A lot of the students did fairly well with this, most of the mistakes were with adding and subtracting with regrouping, which we will be revisiting next week. Hope this helps and, like I said during conferences, math tests will be coming home from here on out. Thanks!
We will be having a test on bar models and two-step word problems tomorrow. Please help your student prepare for this test. I don't expect many have it perfectly yet, but we have been working on these for about three weeks and, for now, we are going to test, move-on, and come back to it again later in the year. Many students are very frustrated with it, which is expected since it requires a lot of slow, careful thinking in order to get through these problems. See the videos from my previous blog, as well as, the materials on the homework page. Thanks!
FYI: There are a lot of worms, dirt, and project related things. It has been awhile! Being out sick so much and then the holidays has really taken it's toll on keeping up-to-date on my weebly. I have lots of pictures to post of the last field trip and those will be coming soon. Right now I just wanted to post some helpful homework and math practice information. As a second grade team, we share our Bingo Logs and sometimes as we share, we still do differently things in the classroom. With that in mind sometimes things come up on the Bingo Logs that they may be doing in another class, that we may not be doing in here. I had some questions about practicing sight words, and while we aren't focusing on spelling words in general, sights words are super important to be able to read and spell. You can find the first 1000 sight words here: Fry Words. This is not something that is required to do all the time and there will not be a spelling test, but practicing these words is helpful if your child is a lower level readers or struggles with simple words. In math we have been focusing on bar modeling. This has been a tough activity because most students want to rush through and not use the bars. These bars are extremely helpful though (and required) as we move into two-step word problems. Almost all the students struggle with word problems because they rush through and don't take the time to picture the problem in their head. Bar modeling is an easy way to get the kids to slow down, but can be overwhelming because of the wordiness of some of the problems. Below are two videos that explain what bar modeling is and how it helps with word problems. Finally, our water PBL has officially begun. I will have more about that on my PBL site soon.
Here are our questions: Driving Question: How Can Everyone in the World Have Safe Water? The class will break into 5 expert groups: 1) In places where people have to walk for water, what impact does this have on their communities? 2) Why don't people have safe water? 3) What happens when people don't have safe water? 4) How do we get our water, where does it come from? 5) Why do we need to conserve our water? I hope this helps and, again, PBL and pictures are coming soon! Thanks! |
AuthorMs. Martin's blog showing how we work together, how we learn together, and how we are inspired in Second Grade. Archives
June 2015
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