Stone Soup
Friday, October 3, 2008
By the time you read this, we will have returned from our field trip to Northfield Mountain. I’m sure the children will have plenty to tell you—you’ll have to wait a little longer to get the official version from me. I can tell you that in addition to the boat ride on the river we also had a scavenger hunt in the woods and on the boat for things like differently shaped leaves, acorns, eagles, cattails and so on. Thanks to everyone for getting the trip money in on time, and to Jayden’s mom for providing us with a snack. (And thanks to all the parents who have sent in snack donations. The cupboard looks pretty good!)
The rest of the week we continued our exploration of rocks, as well as visiting with Angela Hucles, a gold-medal Olympic soccer player. Angela was here with representatives of Florence Savings Bank as part of a program to talk about saving money. On Monday, our social studies lesson consistedof working together cooperatively. We juggled beanbags as a class, tossing them to each other in a set pattern. Once we got good at one beanbag, we added a second and then a third. We did quite well with two, and we’ll keep practicing with that third one! We also pretended to be farm animals (I whispered an animal into each child’s ear). Without looking, the children had to crawl around to find the rest of their herd, using only the animal’s sound. Once we’d finished, one child spoke up “Let’s do it again!” Now that October is here, I’m seeing more teamwork, as well as children making new friends. I’m also having a lot of fun with the class now that we know each other a little better (not that it wasn’t fun before—now it’s REALLY fun). Now we are starting to pay attention to how frequently students interrupt me and each other during our group conversations. Monday we had nearly 100 interruptions. By Thursday, we were under forty. In addition to helping us pay attention to what’s going on with each other, the children are also recognizing how to judge if what they want to share needs to be shared right away, and how to wait for just the right moment to share. It’s hard for me too, because they always have such good ideas!
During workboard the children searched the classroom for compound words, cut out and colored mice, filling their stomachs with interesting food (a connection to Denise Flemings Lunch!), played a game called RoadBlock (setting up cars and trucks on a board to match a corresponding card; the object is to slide the cars without lifting them and get the trapped red car off of the board), completing a dot-to-dot that counted by twos and sorting and recording words by their endings. Our stories keep perking along, and soon you will be able to draw “Doodlie Creatures,” “Scare Someone,” and “Dance” by reading the Second Grade Series of How to Books.
In math, we’ve been working on addition and subtraction using a variety of tools and methods. Last week we explored adding 10 to similar numbers (10 + 12, 10 + 22) to connect students to the patterns that emerge when adding ten. When asked how these two problems were similar, the kids assured me they weren’t the same at all. Soooo—this week we’ve been doing “number strings” which are pure addition or subtraction, focusing on the strategy of adding or subtracting tens to see what we might notice. (For example—14 + 10, 24 + 10, 64 + 10 and then 13 – 3, 43 – 3, 73 – 3). Guess what? We discoved that “40 is like 10’s” because “it has 4 tens” and that you just jump ten on the 100’s chart, and “adding fives is like adding tens—five and five equals ten.” Many children have begun to be able to hold on to the ten when they do their problem sheets now; just as many continue to make groups of tens and count by ones when they search for a total. Our next goal is to begin to use the units to make adding and subtracting easier. However, when asked if two problems were similar (37 – 10, 27 – 10) the answer was “Yes!”
Dates to remember:
Monday, October 6th—Picture Day!