Good Afternoon,
Today marks the last day of Mr. Cadwell being with our classroom. He has done a tremendous job and is more than ready for a classroom of his own. The students have truly loved him and I know they are sad to see him go. This afternoon we celebrated Parker. The class had made a book of their favorite things that they got to do with him. Each child read their page. Parker had written a note to each kid as well. Afterwards we celebrated with ice cream sandwiches.
This week we continued looking at the effects adding or subtracting heat from an object has on its state of matter. We spent yesterday and today making predictions about items, adding or subtracting heat, and then recording our observations. We have two more experiments to do after vacation and we will then start our books about making maple syrup and the scientific concepts of the states of matter.
I spent a lot of time working with fact families and fact triangles this week. The strategy was to use addition to check their subtraction work and to also use doubles +1/-1 facts to solve unknown problems. We also discussed the idea of even and odd numbers. None of the students understood this concept but we used some number racks to quickly gain an understanding.
Ms. Figdor had this to say about 2nd grade math: This week in second grade our focus was area. We learned that area measures the space inside of two dimensional shapes. The second graders found the area of polygons using various pattern block shapes. They discovered that the same shape could have different areas depending on the shape used to measure the area. A shape with an area of 10 triangles would have an area of 5 rhombus shapes (The rhombus shape was twice the size of the triangle shape in our pattern blocks). After this initial exploration of area the second graders learned that mathematicians typically measure area in square units and so they had the opportunity to build shapes on their geoboards and find the area of those shapes. During Number Corner we continued to learn about fractions. We discovered two models to represent fractions, the area model and the set model.
That is all for now. I hope you all have a great weekend and (if you have time off) a great vacation. I will spend next week teaching in Lawrence, MA. I will be teaching 4th grade math all week. I am truly looking forward to it.
Peace,
Tommy
