Shelburne Museum Slideshow

 Shelburne Museum Slideshow

Our Books Inspired by Eric Carle

Please click play to hear us reading the pages that we designed. (There is a short pause between each page.)

Busy Mathematicians

Learning about place value by grouping beans by 10's to figure out how many all together

We have been focusing on these math concepts:

Place value: Making groups of tens to count into the hundreds
We estimated and then counted how many beans were in a bag of kidney beans.  In the picture above, the papers represent the 100's, 10's and 1's places.  As beans were grouped by tens in small cups, they were then combined into containers of 100.  We have also solved riddles to practice place value such as: I have 2 tens and 5 ones.  Who am I?  And, more challenging:  If you gave me 2 more tens, I would be 80.  Who am I?

Finding the difference between quantities through comparing and subtracting
We have estimated how many scoops of a cup it would take to get 50 beans.  Then we counted our estimate by grouping the beans by 10's.  We compared if we scooped greater than or less than 50.  Finally we wrote an equation to show our work.  So if we scooped 68, our equation would be 68-50=18.  We found out that there are 18 more beans in our estimate than 50.  18 is the difference.

Class Community

Practicing 'debugging' with Ms. Wideman

Our Class Rules

A very important part of our first 6 weeks of school is creating a class community.  When children feel secure in their class, they are more willing to try new activities to further their learning. 

We create class community in a variety of ways:

• Getting to know each other through our "About Me" unit
• Sharing our hopes and dreams for the year
• Creating our class rules together  (In case you'd like to read the details, from above, our rules state: be safe, treat others how you would like to be treated, respect the environment around you, try your best)
• Practicing respectful ways to solve social problems (We call this "debugging" and recently sent home a sheet that gives ideas for practicing.)
• Playing games, having fun and enjoying each other's company

Opinion Writing, Oreo Style!

Opinion writing is one of the writing genres that we teach second graders. It is a great way to start off the year because it lends itself to many writing pieces and children this age have many opinions!

We teach them how to write a structured paragraph including a focus statement (their opinion), supporting details (why they feel that way) and a conclusion.

Last week we used an Oreo cookie to model this process.  Please visit our student blogs with your child to see how we did this. Have them teach the method to you. Ask them about the two opinion pieces we have written so far. It was a fun way to learn a life-long skill!