Fabulous Friday

Wow, I don't know where the week went!  We were very busy with our apple investigations and making applesauce.  This morning we completed part of our Apples to Applesauce science investigations sheet.  We learned how to write a procedure using transition words. We also hypothesized how solid apples turn to liquid sauce.  Our discussion also led to how matter changes states by changing temperature.  We discovered that we used 3 single substances to create our applesauce mixture.   After our great discussion we finally started the crock pot and smelled apples all day.  Our afternoon was short because we had a practice evacuation drill that took a good 25 minutes.  Our class did very well by the way.  We were not able to have library checkout due to the drill, so I will have kids check out throughout the day on Monday.  We have started our new math book and are looking at ways to write numbers to 1000.  We are having to write numbers in words which is a new skill for second grade.  The students are doing pretty well.  We will talk about expanded notation on Monday.  I will be putting new math homework in next week's packet that comes from the new program.  Enjoy the pictures from our tasting of applesauce!

Marvelous Monday

The students had a substitute this morning while I met with the representative from our new math program.  I sent home a note about the new program in your child's mail today.  I'm excited about the parts to the program.  Hopefully the student workbooks will arrive tomorrow.  I will be sending home the old math book and students can use it for extra practice. 

Zaher thinks this: Today we go new math books, they're very cool!  They have very nice pictures. 

Last Friday we used our observation skills and compared  the attributes of 2 different types of rocks.  Our classmate Hassan Z. brought back lava rocks from his trip to Hawaii.  They were perfect for practicing observing attributes for our science unit.  Attributes include: size, shape, texture, weight, color.  We used balance scales to compare weight.  

Hassan wrote this for our science lesson:

Today in science we told the difference between a lava rock and a regular rock.  We looked at them with a magnifying glass.  I loved it and so did the class.  The lava rocks were so cool.

In writing, students are working on writing books.  Some students chose to write nonfiction, others chose fiction.  Our focus was punctuation.  We discussed capitals and ending punctuation (Punctuation Takes A Vacation) by reading stories on the topic.  Students are also illustrating  their work.  These stories may become a narrated video later on.  

Elissa writes: Today in writing we learned about periods, exclamation points, question marks, commas, colons and capitalization.  We wrote stories using some of these marks.

Terrific Tuesday

We started science today by observing some sage leaves I brought in from my garden.  Students used their senses to describe how the leaf looked, smelled and some even tasted the sage.  

In reading, we started talking about the features of non-fiction text.  We also discussed the purpose of these features and how they help us read the text.  Students looked through non-fiction books and then discussed how they are different from fiction.  The features we found so far are:

1. Real pictures: The purpose is to make it more realistic and help us see things we might not see in our life.
2. Sub-titles:  Sub-titles help us to get ready for what we will read.  It is important to read the sub-titles.
3. Fact boxes:  Fact boxes offer more facts about the topic.  It is important to read the information in these boxes.

We will continue this discussion for the rest of the week.  Our read aloud was with Mrs. Barion today.   She will visit our class every Wednesday.  Students benefit from hearing fluent readers read to them.

Math: We are working on addition right now.  I will get trained on our new Math program on Monday, October 10.  We will start it on Tuesday.  Check back for regular updates.