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.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Well we didn't get our wish...we were out of school both Monday and Tuesday of this week.  Right now we have a big snow storm heading our way.  They are predicting 8-12 inches! Enough already!  Needless to say we don't have any finished products to post this week.  We are in the middle of everything.  Hopefully we will have a five day week next week and some exciting things to share with you.

Hope you have a great weekend and are not snowed in like we are going to be.

Kim and Anne

Similes, Native Americans and Polygons

January 24, 2014

Hi Everyone! We have survived another frigid week in Chicago, but it seems the worst is yet to come, as the forecast calls for horrible weather at the beginning of next week.

Before moving into expository writing, we decided to have one more crack at adding sensory images and supporting details to our writing. We did this by introducing similes to our students. We began by reading the books, My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks by Hanoch Piven, and Crazy Like a Fox, A Simile Story by Loreen Leedy. We also read two simile snow poems, and students had to identify the similes. Then, students had to write their own winter similes. We weren't sure how they would turn out, based on their oral responses, but we were quite pleased with the results.

We started the non-fiction part of our Native American unit. Kim found a great formative assessment to gage how much background knowledge students had about them.  It was called, "Agreement Circles" from Page Keeley's book, Science Formative Assessment. It was a physical way for students to not only demonstrate their background knowledge, but to also defend their thinking. Before reading the poem called Native Americans, students were given pictures of different Native American ways of life, and they had to sort the pictures however they wanted. The poem introduced students to the different cultural regions and ways of life for the Native Americans. It was a complex poem, but after discussing it, the students were then able to resort the pictures that matched the different cultural regions.

To complete the lesson, we made a map of the different regions and revisited the "Agreement Circle." The students were more decisive, and able to defend their thinking with specific information they had learned from the poem. It really was a good formative assessment!

We had more fun with polygons this week. We found that our students really didn't know the different types of polygons, so they needed lots of practice with them. We found a great polygon lesson from AIMS Education called "Pondering Polygons." The geoboard activity was a big hit, as well as the   Pick a Polygon game.

Those were the highlights of the week for us. Hopefully we will have a five day week to write about next week! Keeping our fingers crossed!

Kim and Anne

Two New Products on Teachers Pay Teachers

Monday, January 20, 2014

We are a day late, but our lesson plans for The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush and The Legend of the Bluebonnet  are up on our Teachers Pay Teachers store.  Hope you can check them out.  Let us know what you think.

Finally Back!

January 18, 2014

Hello Everyone,
It is good to be back on the blog. We have really missed it! Chicago weather has led to an interesting start to the new year. We are finally back on track!

We spent a great amount of time over winter break writing two reading lesson plans that cover several of the Common Core  State Standards. They also blend in well with our second grade social studies history curriculum on Native Americans. The plans are centered around the Tomie DePaolo books, The Legend of The Bluebonnet, and The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush. Both plans include the same common core activities: a story structure organizer to sequence events in the story, a Question-Anwer-Relationship (QAR) page, a character trait puzzle,  an extended response question, and an extension activity for vocabulary.  We included answer pages to go along with each activity. Our goal is to have these plans up on our Teachers Pay Teachers store Sunday afternoon. We used these plans for our formal evaluation this year, and they were both very successful. We couldn't have been happier with the students' performance, focus, and deep learning of the standards. Here are some pictures of the activities.

We don't normally talk about math on our blog, but we are starting one of our favorite units, Geometry! We love this unit because we can incorporate three of our favorite things with math: art, reading, and writing. As we learned about points and line segments, we had the students use the art method of Pointillism to create a line or circle design. This lesson came from Renee Goularte.  She has great lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers. For our parallel line lesson, we used art to involve the students with the concepts in a hands-on way. They seemed to have a better understanding as they made their designs and identified parallel and not parallel lines in their writing. Some students even wrote about perpendicular lines and transversals.  This lesson came from the 2007 edition of teaching preK-8: The Magazine for Professional Development.

As we move further into our geometry unit, we will be using a new website we found called Math Is Fun. You might want to check it out! We are going to begin with the Sorting Shapes activity.

In science, we are learning about the properties of solids. We learned about engineers, and how they have to think about how the properties of solids work together to hold other solids up. Students had to apply what they learned to build towers out of various solid materials that could stand alone. As an extension to this science lesson, we challenged students to build a bridge out of 25 craft sticks and 100 toothpicks. Their bridges needed to be able to support a five pound brick. Testing this week was a hit!

We know we focused on more than just literacy this week, but it always seems like everything just clicks in all areas come January, and it is a really exciting and fun time. We want to share highlights from all of these areas.

See you next week!
Kim and Anne