Oct. 18th News

*****************************************************************************************************

Mrs. Healey’s Classroom News (10/18/15)

*****************************************************************************************************

What We’ve Been Up To:
Thank you for your help with collecting, washing, and pressing leaves! We had a BLAST creating our leaf animals this week and can't wait for the finished products to line our halls.

 

 

Reading: We've been making huge strides during reader's workshop as we continue the second grade "reading growth spurt!" Beginning of the year assessments are complete and guiding individual instruction as we move through our units. We spent this week focusing on the reading work we can do as partners. Reading partners help us practice fluency, act as a coach to help figure out tricky words and check our understanding, and (most importantly!) help us "grow talk". Lizzie, Cate, and Lucas (all former Seals!) were doing such great partnership work, they did a "fishbowl" of their conversation and let us all sit in and watch.

After seeing what we noticed (only one person talked at a time, all eyes were on the speaker and their book, asking follow up questions---what was your favorite part? Why did you like that part? What do you think will happen next?), it was time to practice with our own partners. Everyone did such a great job!

We'll be getting new reading partners on Monday as we launch our "Becoming Experts" unit of reading nonfiction. 

Global Read Aloud: This week, as we continued our Global Read Aloud author study, we read Amy Krouse Rosenthal's story Duck! Rabbit!

After enjoying this great story, we took a class poll to see how many students saw a duck in the illustration, and how many saw a rabbit. We graphed the results and noticed that 9 students thought the image was a rabbit and 6 students thought it was a duck. 

Following our graph, we had our first classroom debate. Both sides made some pretty convincing arguments! Ask your child if they saw a duck or a rabbit and why they think so.

                             

In an exciting conclusion to our debate, we learned that the author thought it was a "drabbit" :) This sparked some great conversation and led into our blog response questions for us to write. We discussed: have you ever thought you were right and then realized you were not? When is it ok to disagree? Can we still be friends and have different opinions? Check out some of our responses!

Remember, you can check out all our responses, as well as what our Canadian friends had to say, at our official Global Read Aloud blog.

5th Grade Reading Buddies: Last Tuesday, coming off of Columbus Day weekend, we teamed up with our 5H reading buddies to build a boat! Using only one piece of aluminum foil, partnerships had just five minutes to design a boat that could hold pennies. After the building was complete, we had a "sail-off" to test just how many pennies could be held! Four of our teams made it to 100 pennies and could have kept going! We'll have to challenge those teams to another round in the future. Ask your child what their boat design looked like and how many pennies they were able to hold. (Pictures to come soon!). 

    **We'll be seeing our reading buddies again this coming Wednesday, 10/21 and we'd like to read Halloween stories by flashlight. If you could send in a flashlight for us to borrow for the day (clearly labeled with your child's name!), that would be great! Thank you, as always, for your help in making learning fun!  I'll send home a paper notice on Monday with this information as well.

Math: During our math workshop, we continue to learn and practice our math facts. ANY help you can give with encouraging your child to practice their addition facts (working towards automaticity) would be greatly helpful as we move forward through our year. We've been talking about a TON of strategies that can help us learn our facts, such as:

     -Doubles (4+4 = 8)

     -Doubles +1, and Doubles -1 (4+4=8, so 4+3=7 and 4+5=9)

     -Combinations of 10 (4+6=10)

     -Making 10 (4+6=10, so 4+8=12...make your 10 first, how many left over? add that to your ten)

     -Turn Around Facts (6+3=9 so 3+6=9)

To help with fact fluency, encourage your child to try some of these activities at home:

Math Playground (scroll down to the addition and subtraction section)

Addition Top-It (card came like "war", each person draws two cards and adds them together, the person with the higher sum wins all four cards) Want more of a challenge? Try drawing three or four cards and adding them together!

Fact Dash

IXL (E.12 would be great addition practice for number stories (word problems) which were also practiced this week!)

Have a FANTASTIC, fall week!!