A Hot Day 3

Since it's Wednesday, we started with an art class with Maggie.  After art, we started our day together in room 402 for the third day of second grade!  We had a morning meeting that included a new game called Changes.  It was a lot of fun.  Then we reviewed the classroom rules we had brainstormed on Tuesday and added more to the list.  Tomorrow we will start finding the right words for these ideas to make a permanent list of classroom rules.  After our morning meeting, we opened up our classroom library for the first time.  We learned about the organization of the books, how to choose a just-right book, and where to keep our books between reading workshops.  We explored where we wanted to sit during the reading workshop and what the room should look like, sound like, and feel like during that time.  We all agreed that it should be quiet, calm, and full of still bodies focused on our own books.

After reading workshop, we started a discussion about our Hopes and Dreams for the school year.  Every class at EVCS is hard at work brainstorming hopes for the year, as well as an action plan to accomplish it.  We then read a great book, Big Al by Andrew Clements.  It tells the story of big, scary-looking fish who hopes and dreams to make friends.  He tries over and over to make friends, but it just never works. Finally, though, he achieves his goal by doing something great for the other fish.  We will be using this story throughout the next week to create our own Hopes and Dreams.  We will then hang them in the classroom to reflect on throughout the year.  After that, we read the next chapter from The Twits, our daily chapter book and then headed to recess and lunch.  Then came Quiet Time - but this time the library was open too!  Now we can read, write, draw or rest during Quiet Time.

Then we started our first math unit.  We use Terc Investigations as our main math curriculum.  This unit it about numbers 0-10 and the fluency of adding and subtracting numbers within 10.  We used a new math tool today: connecting cubes.  We first explored and built with the cubes to get used to them.  Then we used them to add numbers.  We saw that two towers of 4 cubes plus one tower of 2 cubes equaled ten - yet so did two towers of 5, and so did  three towers of 3 plus one tower of 1!  We wrote equations for the towers we built and for the towers other people built.

Here are 5 different ways to show the number 10
Red shows 7 + 3 = 10
Purple shows 9 + 1 = 10
Yellow shows 10 + 0 = 10
Orange shows 6 + 4 = 10
Green shows 8 + 2 = 10

Even in the heat, we kept on working.  We then moved back into our journals to either write something new or to add more to our writing from yesterday.  It was a calm and reflective way to end our day.

Last, we played a quick game together and then headed home.  What a busy, busy day!


FYI:  On Wednesdays we have art with Maggie first period.  This is the only day of the week that this occurs, but if your child is running late or we have a rainy-day arrival, please send them to the art studio with their things.