Diving Deeper
It's hard to believe we only have five weeks left in second grade. Since I'm learning and living with the kids everyday, I don't always recognize how much they have grown and changed since we came together in August. Mr. O'Keefe visits with our kids weekly and has pointed out lately how much the kids have matured academically and socially. I'm excited to think about next year and how we can pick up right where we left off. Here's a little of what we've been up to recently:
Reading: On Friday we finished Skylark, and the kids were thrilled with the ending. We couldn't help but rejoice with these characters that we have come to love as they celebrated the end of the terrible drought and the excitement of new life. Patricia Maclachlan has provided us with wonderful lessons to improve our writing. As we pointed out examples of descriptive words and setting in Skylark, one of our girls shouted out, "I can just see it!" Those are wonderful words to hear as a teacher. We are moving forward this week with book clubs. On Monday the kids will explore their options and make their top choices for the books they want. On Tuesday we will set up schedules for their daily reading and jump right in. These books will be read at school unless there is a group that might need an extra day to finish. Our reading log this week will be choice books and standard format.
Writing: We began this week looking at an opinion piece written about lowering the voting age. The kids highlighted the opinion and reasons stated. We looked at the structure including introduction, development of reasons and details, and finally how the author left us with a powerful closing statement. As the kids worked on their opinion pieces we developed a planning structure to help them organize their thoughts (see in photos). Most of the kids are still working on their rough drafts now. One of the most challenging parts of this process for the class has been turning their list of ideas on the plan into sentences and paragraphs that make sense. I have modeled this with them as a group, but this will take time and many one on one conferences as we work through this piece. Two of our classmates were at the rally on Wednesday and realized, "those speeches were just persuasive writing!" We hope to finish up these pieces this week and begin working next week on persuasive speeches pertaining to something we are each passionate about. These speeches will likely require some research to complete so our current pieces are great preparation to scaffold us into the speeches.
Math: We have been extending our work in word problems to cover many of the math topics that we have learned about this year. Over the next five weeks we will be revisiting many topics we have covered but at a deeper level.
Science: This week we reflected on our experience and results from the insulator challenge last week. Then I gave them the chance to redesign their insulators based on this new information. I was quite surprised with how excited they were to make improvements and impressed with their ability to make data driven decisions to create these changes. We also took our questions from our last magnet investigation to explore them a little further this week.
Important Dates
May 14-16 SC READY, grades 3-5May 21 SC PASS, grade 4 & 5
May 17 CFI Family Dance, 6:30—8:00
May 24 Splash Day @ 1:30
May 27 Memorial Day Holiday
May 31 5th Grade Graduation @ 9:00
June 4 5th Grade Showcase of Projects
June 5 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare)
June 6 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare) Last Day of School
We began writing this week by looking at an opinion piece about lowering the voting age. We outlined the opinion and the reasons presented by the author. This article also gave us the opportunity to examine a strong introduction and powerful closing statement.
As we began planning a our pieces, we developed this structure to organize our ideas. Then we were able to see the 5 sections which will become paragraphs in our pieces.
In math, we carried our work with word problems deeper by writing our own problems which we have begun exchanging them with each other to solve.
We continued our investigations into magnets this week. The kids have developed some thoughtful questions based on their experiences with magnets so far.
This wasn't part of my job description but Dr. Hass and I removed a little visitor from one of the trash cans out front. I think he was enjoying a snack in his dark, little hideout!
The warm weather has made life evident all around us right now.
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| A swallow building a nest on my porch. |
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| Lydia with a friend at recess. |
