Newsletter 3/18

We have had a great week. Everyone was really more than helpful giving me lots of experience being in front of the classroom and in charge.

Here is what we got into this week.

Science

Science has been a blast this week. We launched an inquiry into solids and liquids. We started the week by investigating solids. We made lots of observations about random solid objects to realize that solid is a type of object, not just an adjective that describes things. We made similar observations about liquids, noticing that liquids have some very difficult characteristics. While everyone was excited to make some observations, we also got to use some balance beam scales, which was a lot of fun. I was surprised with how well and how accurately everyone used the scales in their groups.

After making our observations, we made a chart trying to come up with definitions for solids and liquids in order to challenge the thinking the next day. On Thursday, we did one last investigation of some more complex objects: sugar, jello, shaving foam, and oobleck (cornstarch and water). These objects challenged their thinking about solids and liquids, forcing them to revisit their definitions. Then, today, they had to formulate an opinion (which we were working on during writing) about each object, defining it as a liquid or a solid. Next week, we will revisit these and see if we can improve our definition of a solid or liquid. 

Math

We began a unit on Geometry last week, continuing our investigation this week. We read a couple great books that introduced the ideas of Tesselations and Tangrams to the kids. Both of these mathematical designs gave us the chance to interact with really deep geometric concepts in fun ways. Most importantly, though, the kids got really excited about studying math.

We began the week by examining shapes to see what we notice about them. We collected all our observations in a chart, adding important geometry vocabulary like angle and parallel. Our important goal during the geometry unit was just to play with the shapes to get a better understanding of how they are created and what makes them special. We combined this unit with explorations, adding in some building activities that gives them a more advanced understanding of how shapes play an important role in the real world. 

Since shapes give us a great chance to reinforce the important mathematical strategy of trial and error, we completed a lot of tasks that challenge students understanding of space and size. We started the week making tangrams to get the shapes out of the Kingdom of Geometry (all set up by the book The Kingdom of Geometry by Ada Alma Flora. In the book, an evil square becomes king, persecuting all non-square shapes.) The tangrams gave students a chance to play with symmetry and build on their spacial reasoning to lay the foundation for developing deep understanding of not only geometric concepts but also multiplication and fractions. 

In our final math task for this week, we began making tesselations based on A Cloak for the Dreamer, a book about a family of tailors designing cloaks for an Archduke. The kids got to chose different shapes to create a pattern for their cloak, describing the shape and why they wanted to use it for their pattern.  

Reading

In reading, we have been working on thinking deeply about texts, capturing the process of our thoughts in writing. We started the week by trying to make observations about pictures depicting unfamiliar situations and then turn those observations into inferences.We used observations journals to collect the things we noticed with the inferred thoughts. Our ultimate goal was to think deeply about what we saw in order to understand how we went about making meaning of the situation, so I was awestruck to see how the look of determination in their eyes to capture everything in order to make intelligent and artful inferences.

On Thursday, we moved on to bring the same deep thinking we had done with the pictures into our reading. We read Rare Treasure: Mary Anning and Her Remarkable Discoveries by Don Brown to see if we could make observations about the story which we could build into predictions (a type of inference). While reading, we stopped from time to time to think deeply about what we had read, write down what we noticed about the story, and make informed prediction based on what we had read. Asking second grade students to develop thoughts and justify them with the text can be a very difficult cognitive challenge, so I was delighted to see how successful everyone was with the task. 

Everyone was so successful, in fact, that we were able to make justified predictions during independent reading. During silent reading, we kept a few post-it notes to make observations about the text and formulate some predictions while reading without my guidance. We made some terrific progress on this, this week, so I'm looking forward to continuing this idea on into making informed conclusions and inferences about unexpressed ideas in books and with difficult words.

Writing

In writing this week, we began an inquiry into opinion writing. Instead of coming up with opinions and letting them stand on their own, we worked toward making observations to support our opinions, building off what he had been learning in reading. This is another area that can be conceptually difficult for second graders. While many of us are incredibly good at articulating our ideas when we are having a discussion, moving beyond speaking to writing down our ideas can be very difficult. It requires us to slow down and think about what we believe, forming a complete thought on paper. As a result, I found myself so many times this week saying, "That's brilliant, write it down!" We had to really work hard to capture our thoughts.

We began our unit by building off what we had been doing in reading. We took looked at our inferences as opinions and tried to use our observations to justify them. It was a lot of work to write down our ideas and organize them. We had to work to make observations that connected with our inferences and limit our ideas to what we could prove. To make this a bit easier, we worked to structure our ideas into bulleted lists with a single belief at the top. These bullet lists gave us a structure to guide our thinking and make writing opinion paragraphs a bit easier. By the end of the week, we had created an opinion about a picture and took a stance on the four odd structures we examined during science.