All Things Native Americans

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Hi everyone. We're writing on a Thursday night because we are at school waiting for our Rock and Reading family night to begin. Because we are short on time, we are going to jump right in with some highlights.

We are still on our Native American unit because of all of our days off (we've had three four day weeks now!), working with our ISAT buddies, and last minute assessing for our second trimester. We are wrapping up our study of the Eastern Woodland Native Americans. We used two different website sources to gather information about their ways of life. These sites are interactive, so they were highly engaging for the students. After reading and discussing the different aspects of the Eastern Woodland Native Americans' daily living, we recorded the important information on a matrix. This killed three birds with one stone- we talked about main idea and details, identified important information, and discussed the importance of gathering information from two sources.

Website #1

Website #2

One part of the matrix focuses on the homes of the Native Americans. The students were very interested in the idea that some Eastern Woodland Native Americans lived in wigwams. We think they just liked the sound of the word, but they said they could not visualize or imagine what that home looked like. So, we found directions on how to make a wigwam out of construction paper and coffee filters. Again, this fun activity not only helped them visualize a wigwam, but also made them read and follow steps in a process.

To review the visualization strategy, as well as poetry devices, we read and discussed the poem, Indian Children. The author is unknown. Then, the students illustrated their visualizations. We really feel that sometimes the strategy of visualizing is underrated, but we think it is vital for students' comprehension. We tell the students over and over again that there should a movie in their minds as they read, and if there is that means they are understanding what they are reading. We model this for them all the time as well.

Another part of the matrix addresses the customs. We learned that the Native Americans loved to play guessing games. One game is called "Passing the Stone." The students loved playing it.

Finally, we revisited the Native American myth and fable from last week. We completed a Venn diagram to compare and contrast The Great Ball Game and Why Bat Has No Friends. We were pleased to see that our students were able to independently generate more ideas for the Venn diagram than before. They are getting closer to our Learning Target Bullseye. (We'll talk about that in another blog.)

Next week we will share a great math lesson from Aims Education, and some articles that really made us reflect on our teaching, and have reenergized us for the last part of the year.

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Angle Fun and More

Friday, February 21, 2014

Hi Everyone,

We hope you found the Bright Ideas Hop useful.  We are not quite ready to link into it yet.  We're still just "getting our feet wet" as we learn the ins and outs of it.  But, we do want to share some more ideas that we hope you can use in your classroom.

In math we have been sharing our students based on their needs.  We want to make sure students that need enrichment are receiving it and are being challenged.  We also want to make sure that students who want to work at a slower pace have that opportunity.  One of the ways we enriched our students this week was learning about obtuse, acute, and right angles.  This is not in our second grade curriculum, but it was a great extension for our geometry unit.  Once again we used lessons from Aims Education.  They were called Angle Aerobics, Angles More or Less and Angle Hunt. The kids loved making the different types of angles with their bodies and going on their angle hunt in the classroom.  As an extreme challenge at the end, we went to the BBC Bite Size angle game to learn about the different degrees of angles.

Students wrote a reflection to demonstrate their learning.

The other group worked on finding compliments of multiples of ten.  This is extremely challenging for them, but we found an app called Math Tappers: Find Sums.  This provided excellent visuals of the compliment process, and it was easier for students to find those compliments.  This was a great springboard into using the base-ten blocks to help them solve problems in their journal pages.

42 + ? = 60  The students could easily see the answer was 18.

We are continuing with our Native American unit and our study of folktales.  After reading and discussing The Great Ball Game or Why Little Bat Has No Friends, students had to find the six most important parts of the story so they could summarize it.  To do this, they had to go back and closely read the text and make judgements as to what was the most important.  We came together, shared ideas, and then created a summary wheel.

We had a fun week at school.  We look forward to sharing more with you next week.

Kim and Anne

Hoppin Good Ideas

Friday, February 14, 2014

One year ago when we began our blog, our purpose was to share creative, motivating, yet effective ideas you could easily incorporate into your classroom.  Hopefully you have found some of them useful. Recently we came upon something called Bright Ideas Blog Hop.  Teachers blog about tips, tricks and ideas that have worked well in their classrooms.  When you are finished reading one blog, it links you to the next idea blog in the hop.  We just found this yesterday and already we have new ideas about our writing mentor text bulletin board, two great math place value and problem solving ideas, and our favorite one called Table Top Twitter!  We thought we'd get you started hopping with this blog site.

Happy Hopping!

We are not part of the Bright Idea Hop just yet, but here are two ideas from our classrooms that you may want to use with your students.

The Aims Education Foundation is one of our favorite resources to use when we want to enrich and deepen our math and science curriculums.  This week we used an old version of What Do You Sink Will Float? (Darn it! We didn't see this new and nicer version in time).  This was used to enrich our students' understandings of properties of solids.  It also forced them to change their thinking of the reasons why an object will sink or float.  Originally all of the students believed it was based on the object's weight.  After weighing each object, predicting which would sink or float, and then testing each object, we were shocked to find out that a tiny paperclip that weighed less than a gram would sink, while the pencil that weighed 5 grams floated.  The students soon thought about the material each object was made of and wondered if that had something to do with whether it sunk or floated.  This was a perfect segue into a discussion about density, which then will lead to an experiment about density.

Our second idea is our buzz log writing.  In our classroom our students "buzz" about their nightly reading.  Each night the students read a book that they have chosen.  The following day they get into small groups of 3-4 students and discuss what is happening in their books, as well as their thoughts and the strategies they used while reading.  Some days we extend that talk to writing about their reading.  In their blue notebooks, our students write us a letter telling us what they talked about in their buzz groups. We believe a combination of talking and writing about their thoughts deepens their comprehension, as well as motivates them to read.  Below are two buzz log entries.  One is from the beginning of the year and the other is from recently.  Notice the growth.

Again, we hope you can use some of the ideas we have presented her in this blog.  We would love to hear your comments below.

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

A Snapshot of Our Week

Friday, February 7, 2014

At last a full week of school!  After feeling like we accomplished nothing last week, this week it seems like we were able to delve deep into math, reading and writing.  That feels great!

We are nearing the end of our geometry unit, which is bittersweet because the kids are loving it.  In one  lesson we told the students to go to the Icy Slides Flips and Turns website to discover what flips, turns, and slides mean in geometry.  They were so focused and loved being in control of their learning. They understood the concepts better than if we would have modeled for them and given them a paper-pencil activity to do.

After the students learned these geometry concepts, we put examples in our math notebooks.

Then it was time to move on to 3-dimensional shapes. Using the Ellison paper cutter, we made solid shape patterns for the students to assemble. We wanted them to see how they looked flat, and predict what shape each one would make when we folded them into solids. After assembling them, we identified the number of faces, edges, and vertices. We really think this hands-on activity begins to solidify their understanding of solid shape attributes.

Next, we used straws and twist ties to assemble different types of pyramids. It is always challenging for students to look at the base of the pyramid and name it accurately. Again, the hands-on activity kept them engaged while they were discovering attributes of different pyramids. We made a chart of each pyramid's attributes and found patterns among the attributes.

For writing, we are beginning our In January lesson, however, we have tweaked it to In Winter. We are using this lesson to formally introduce expository writing. We used the book In November by Cynthia Rylant as our mentor text. In small groups we brainstormed different winter activities and details. In our opinion, the lead is the hardest part to write, so we wrote it together as a class, and they turned out great! We realized the leads were great because of the support we could give them while we were writing our first draft. We were able to revise and give our students things to think about, such as: Is this the best word to use? Could we add some alliteration or a simile? Does this sound right? So we changed our plans, and decided to continue to support them during the drafting of the first body paragraph. Below is the start of the writing.

We wanted to do a figurative language mini-lesson with onomatopoeia so we could add some to our expository writing. We read Slop Goes the Soup, by Pamela Edwards, and then each student made a page that was patterned after the book.

We hope you enjoyed reading this little snapshot of our week!

Kim and Anne

P.S. Here is the link to an AIMS blog that is loaded with fun Valentine's Day math activities.