This Week in 2nd/3rd

students playing math games together

Math

What a week! Ms. Kelly’s math group had a math-tastic time learning about and playing games related to place value. These Betas used hundreds charts to order three and four digit numbers from least to greatest. It sure is fun to play games against your teacher – this time Ms. Kelly won! These mathletes closed out their week with subtraction word problems in the hundreds using base ten blocks and they even balanced numbers with bears – how cool is that?!

Ms. Skylar’s math group focused on reviewing everything that they covered in unit 1, in preparation for their post-assessment. These Betas worked HARD during the course of the unit – they can order and compare numbers from least to greatest, greatest to least, round to the nearest tens, hundreds, and thousands places, write very large numbers in standard, word, and expanded forms, and solve word problems – seeing their progress along the way was so awesome! These mathematicians spent two math periods taking their post assessment answering 10 questions each day and wrapped up with a few rounds of super fun and well deserved “Place Value Bingo”. Monday will kick off with a pre-assessment for unit 2 :) WELL DONE, Y’ALL!

HEY – How do you teach math to a chicken?…You show them lots of egg-samples! Not all math jokes are terrible, just sum. BA-DUM-TSSS!

Children using letters together

Literacy

As always, the kiddos started each day identifying, discussing and correcting all of our silly teacher mistakes in the news and announcements message, they’re getting quite good at it – we’re hoping that this editing skill will transfer over to their own writing soon! Reading workshop was chock-full of phonics fun (try saying that 5 times fast) and book club read alouds and responses. We’ve been working diligently on our Imaginary Invention paragraphs and illustrations and this week we FINISHED them – well done Betas! These writers practiced more cursive and then wrote stellar sentences about school and electricity using various types of punctuation. It’s not too often, but whenever there’s a free second or two during the school day, you can catch these kids devouring a good book or writing epic stories in their writers notebooks! Literacy ROCKS!

teacher teaching class on ground

Theme

Theme time continues to be ELECTRIFYING! This week the kiddos participated in a conductor/insulator lab where they tested various objects using their battery circuits to determine if electricity could pass through or not. Like all good scientists, these Betas recorded all of their new data and findings in their Travel Journals, it’s very official business! The real HIGHLIGHT of theme this week was the creation of their file folder circuits. The kiddos were so AMPED when they learned that they could make a holiday light turn on with just a few office supplies and a battery! We <3 Science!