This Week's Teaching Strategies

Well, I am going to rewind the week and show you what kinds of things I encountered in teaching this week and the kinds of strategies I incorporated into my subjects.  We worked on adjective review, music fun, balancing experiments, and identifying numbers to 1,000 in expanded form and adding and taking away from the hundreds and tens place.

Language Strategy for Adjectives: Well, thanks to our adjective dress up show, students seem to get the concept of what an adjective is.  Once students watched classmates present their costume, they started calling out so many adjectives that it was hard for me to keep up.  This week we focused on using adjectives tell how many with exact numbers and with words such as many, some, a few, etc.

Vampire

Little Joe Dirt

Reading Strategy: We used reference sources to identify ways to find information.  Students took notes in their writing journals and identified the latest and greatest sources like I-pads, various tablet devices, and of course the Internet.  I wasn't surprised that they even identified Google as a great source of information.  They learned that you can search for just about any kind of information when we did animal reports a few weeks ago and did our research in the computer lab.  I also introduced them to the age old Thesaurus, the outdated encyclopedia book we all grew up with, a dictionary, and an atlas.  We had a great class discussion and then did some cut and paste resources to their meaning.  I failed to take a picture of this activity.

Click here to download cut and paste activity.

Science Strategies: students enjoyed getting their balance on!  Students enjoyed activities including balancing a paper butterfly, and using a beam, fulcrum, and unifix cubes to create balance.  They discovered that moving the fulcrum was a must when trying to balance cubes that had a lot more on one side than the other.  All of our supplies came from our wonderful AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative) kit.  We are so blessed to have this resource!!  I had planned to let them build mobiles Friday, but we had a 3 hour delay because of expected icing on the roadways.  We will just have to pick up next week!

AMSTI Science Balancing

 Math Strategies with expanded numbers in math was our focus this week.  My student teacher did a fabulous job with a lesson for us this week.  She really emphasized standard form and expanded form.  With our new common core standards, we are learning more and more how important vocabulary is to our students' understanding.  Students are going to see this vocabulary in standardized tests as well as upper grade levels. Students have been building numbers to a thousand all week.  Their major problem area has been what to do when they do not have a number in one of the place values such as the tens place.  Some students want to leave it blank or put the number for the ones place in the tens place.  We have been doing intervention to correct this misconception and as of yesterday, they now seem to be making the connection.

We had our 100th day this week too.  So, we had all kinds of math fun with 100.  Students drew themselves now and when they are 100, counted by 100 using objects brought from home, wrote 100 words, explained what they would do with $100, showed ways to make $1.00 or 100 cents, and told their favorite 100 things.   

My second graders were greeted with a 100th day  poster as they entered the classroom.

Students brought in lots of candy and other objects of 100.