Our first week back to school was great, but exhausting! The days flew by and it seemed like we were constantly on the go. As usual, we over planned, and did not get through our week's worth of lessons, but we're on the way to establishing routines and helping our students become aware of the behavior that is needed for them to become in charge of their own learning. Our students need to be able to make responsible decisions and to work together cooperatively. This takes time, but the old saying, "slow down to speed up" really is true in our classrooms. Even though it was slow, here are some of the activities students said were the highlights of the week.
To help our students get to know each other we did the Getting to Know You Necklace that we told you about this summer. It was a big hit! Thank you Sunny Days in Second Grade for this idea!
We told you we were planning on using the story Tikki Tikki Tembo retold by Arlene Mosel to learn more about why our students' names are special. As an extension of that activity, we found a math name activity that introduced the kids to the words range, mode, median, and mean. While this was a challenge, especially finding the mean, it really did hook in our highest math students. For privacy purposes, we cropped off the names of the students until we get permission to use their first names.
To introduce math, we started with the famous question, What is math? To make this a twenty-first century student lesson that would actively engage all of them, students used the iPads to take pictures of examples of math they found in our classrooms. Then, they recorded these examples in their notebooks.
Science is always a favorite in our classrooms. When presented with the question, 'What do scientists do?', students in both rooms mentioned making potions and mixing things together. Many expressed their hopes that we would do this, and that's exactly what we did. That's why the Cabbage Juice Experiment is the perfect start to learning the scientific method. We focused mainly on making observations and what that means.
One final highlight our students wanted us to share was our lesson on visualization using two poems by Jenny Whitehead. One is called The First Day of School and the other is called The 179th Day of School. We introduced the poems with the titles covered. We read the poem to the students and asked them to think about what the titles could be. We charted their responses, and then went back to slowly read the poem to find evidence that either supported their ideas or disproved them. Then, we introduced them to the strategy of visualization. The students each got a card to illustrate one line from the poem that they could imagine in their heads.
Have a great Labor Day weekend!
Kim and Anne
No comments:
Post a Comment