This four-day week had the children learning about two-dimensional geometry, reading and interpreting poems and rehearsing their plays!
Math: The class began the week talking about two-dimensional (2D) shapes. They learned about the features of math 2D shapes: sides, vertices (corners) and angles. The focus in grade two is on polygons or flat shapes with straight sides. We also talk about the circle, which technically is not a polygon as it is considered to be a flat shape with zero sides, zero vertices and zero angles. The children did an activity to prove that the more sides that are added to a 2D shape, the more it looks like a circle. The class practiced identifying and naming polygons, counting sides, vertices and angles and we even discovered that for ANY polygon, the number of sides, vertices and angles are always the same! (For example, a triangle has 3 sides, 3 vertices and 3 angles.) The class did a "shape hunt" around our classroom and found that rectangles are easy to find and shapes like pentagons are almost impossible. Rectangles are easy to manufacture, so most man-made items have rectangle shapes. The children also used "geoboards" with elastic bands to help them discover how to create polygons with different numbers of sides.
Writing/Reading: The students started the week by reading the shape story of a fellow classmate and writing the student author a letter. In the letter, the reviewer wrote something nice, mentioned his/her favourite part of the story and then asked the student author a question. The authors then wrote the answers to these questions.
The children read a couple of poems this week and practised finding rhyming words. Rhyming words can be tricky because they may sound the same, but they aren't always spelled the same. We also talked about how sometimes poems can also be the lyrics to a song, as we learned the song to the Three Little Pigs poem we read. When the class read the poem, Winter Morning, we talked about how poems have fewer words than stories, so the reader has to do a bit more inference kind of thinking to understand what the poem is about.
During our read aloud time, we continued to talk about nursery rhymes and fairy tales. We also read aloud another version of the fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but this version had modern designer furniture and chili instead of porridge!
Art: The class began our glovetopus project! Making small soft sculptures called glovetopuses is a tradition in my classroom. A glovetopus is a little stuffed octopus made out of stretchy gloves. (The name "glovetopus" is a portmanteau of the words "glove" and "octopus".) This week the children stuffed their gloves and chose different coloured buttons for the eyes.)
Oral Communication and Media Literacy: Each child now has a part in the play, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The groups worked together to create the "credits" for their plays, including the title, starring and ending credits. The students picked out costumes to wear and had a chance to rehearse their plays on the stage that includes the bridge and brook.
Books read aloud this week:
Goldilocks and the Three Bears - A Tale Moderne by Steven Guarnaccia
The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns
Once Upon a Time: Three Barnyard Tales - The Little Red Hen, The Ugly Duckling, Chicken Little (now finished) retold by Marilyn Helmer
Math: The class began the week talking about two-dimensional (2D) shapes. They learned about the features of math 2D shapes: sides, vertices (corners) and angles. The focus in grade two is on polygons or flat shapes with straight sides. We also talk about the circle, which technically is not a polygon as it is considered to be a flat shape with zero sides, zero vertices and zero angles. The children did an activity to prove that the more sides that are added to a 2D shape, the more it looks like a circle. The class practiced identifying and naming polygons, counting sides, vertices and angles and we even discovered that for ANY polygon, the number of sides, vertices and angles are always the same! (For example, a triangle has 3 sides, 3 vertices and 3 angles.) The class did a "shape hunt" around our classroom and found that rectangles are easy to find and shapes like pentagons are almost impossible. Rectangles are easy to manufacture, so most man-made items have rectangle shapes. The children also used "geoboards" with elastic bands to help them discover how to create polygons with different numbers of sides.
Writing/Reading: The students started the week by reading the shape story of a fellow classmate and writing the student author a letter. In the letter, the reviewer wrote something nice, mentioned his/her favourite part of the story and then asked the student author a question. The authors then wrote the answers to these questions.
The children read a couple of poems this week and practised finding rhyming words. Rhyming words can be tricky because they may sound the same, but they aren't always spelled the same. We also talked about how sometimes poems can also be the lyrics to a song, as we learned the song to the Three Little Pigs poem we read. When the class read the poem, Winter Morning, we talked about how poems have fewer words than stories, so the reader has to do a bit more inference kind of thinking to understand what the poem is about.
During our read aloud time, we continued to talk about nursery rhymes and fairy tales. We also read aloud another version of the fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but this version had modern designer furniture and chili instead of porridge!
Art: The class began our glovetopus project! Making small soft sculptures called glovetopuses is a tradition in my classroom. A glovetopus is a little stuffed octopus made out of stretchy gloves. (The name "glovetopus" is a portmanteau of the words "glove" and "octopus".) This week the children stuffed their gloves and chose different coloured buttons for the eyes.)
Oral Communication and Media Literacy: Each child now has a part in the play, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The groups worked together to create the "credits" for their plays, including the title, starring and ending credits. The students picked out costumes to wear and had a chance to rehearse their plays on the stage that includes the bridge and brook.
Books read aloud this week:
Goldilocks and the Three Bears - A Tale Moderne by Steven Guarnaccia
The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns
Once Upon a Time: Three Barnyard Tales - The Little Red Hen, The Ugly Duckling, Chicken Little (now finished) retold by Marilyn Helmer
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