News for October 12, 2018
This was another busy four-day week in our class. The children learned about ordinal numbers, the seven general groups to sort animals and performed their sock puppet plays for the class!
The class continued to learn about homophones. These are sets of two or three words that sound exactly the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. For example, a few we have studied already are one/won and some/sum. This week we studied two/to/too a set of three homophones that are easy to spell but the trick is knowing the context of its use in a sentence to know which version to use.
The students learned about the five stages of the writing process: plan, write the rough copy, edit, revise and publish. We discussed rereading and editing written work. In grade two, children are expected to be able to independently edit their work for a capital and period on each sentence, word wall words spelled correctly and to add any words that are missing. Sometimes, for a bigger project, students will edit their written work with the teacher and also publish a “good copy”. The children began a project to create books with stories about a fish. All the students finished planning their stories and most have written and edited their work this week.
In science, the children learned about the last four categories for sorting animals. The seven groups are: mammals, insects, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. They learned, for example, that a bird is an animal that has feathers and a beak. I have included and additional group “invertebrates” (animals without backbones) to include animals like worms, snails and squid (that otherwise would not fit into any of the “standard” groups). Insects are also invertebrates but at the grade two level, they have been given their own group.
In math, the class used what they know about single-digit addition and applied what they know to two-digit addition (without regrouping). They practised adding numbers vertically, starting with the ones and then the tens, and keeping the digits of the sum aligned with the ones and tens. Later in the week, the children learned about cardinal numbers (1,2,3,4...) and ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th…) and how to recognize and use them. The students also had a chance to work with a partner to solve one or two math challenge word problems.
The groups rehearsed and performed their sock puppet plays for the whole class. The students did a great job! The audience provided constructive feedback to the players, commenting on things they liked about the performance (“I liked when the sock stole the diamonds because that was exciting!”) and things that the players could do next time to improve the performance (“next time, please talk louder because it was hard to hear you.”) The plays were videotaped. These videos can be seen in a separate posting.
The children heard the book “One Shoe Blues” read aloud and watched a video of the story starring sock puppets and the famous blues guitarist B. B. King. Here is the link:
The children created the front covers for their fish story books. Each child created the three elements always found on the front cover of a book: the title, the author/illustrator’s name and a picture. These elements were made on white paper, cut out and glued on cardstock.
Books read aloud this week:
More Life-Size Zoo by Teruyuki Komiya
One Shoe Blues by Sandra Boynton
My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett (chapter book)
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