Newsletter: May 16th

This week we invited Mayor Benjamin into the classroom to share the work
we've been doing to research the many great accomplishments of
women around the world, nation, and state of South Carolina. 

In particular, the kids shared their concern for the fact downtown street names and memorials
rarely reflect the contributions of women. The kids also offered connections to other instances
in which particular groups of people are overlooked, disrespected, or treated badly. He listened
very carefully to their words.

After they were finished sharing, Mayor Benjamin shared efforts going on by
Historic Columbia and the Women's Rights and Empowerment Network (WREN)
to address these same issues. He suggested we take a field study to visit the buildings
and street markers they have designated and erected over the past year or two. We also
discussed the possibility of our class joining forces with these two organizations
to provide support. Lastly, Mayor Benjamin offered to give us a personal tour of
City Hall. Looks like we know what at least one of our field trips will be next year!

In writing the kids have been learning cursive while also working to plan for and
write persuasive speeches. We are working on the speeches two or thee days each week and
are  still currently in the planning stages. One aspect of this planning and prep has been to
conduct research.

Topics range from reducing plastic waste to saving the whales to treating all
people with fairness and kindness. We'll begin the actual speeches in another
day or two. 

Speaking of writing, the kids are writing commercials! As part of our inquiry into
magnets we learned of the many ways we use magnets in our daily lives. I then
challenged them to design their own magnetic invention and write a commercial
selling us on their idea. To model how commercials might sound, we watched a
couple of Billy Mays commercials. The kids thought they were hilarious and were
excited to take what they heard and try it for themselves.

This is a list of all the qualities they observed when watching the
mentor commercials. The challenge was to use as many of these as
they needed to really convince us we NEED their product. It's
been a great way to learn about magnets, grow as writers, and share
a couple laughs.

In math we're revisiting key topics from this school year. Most recently, we've
been working with repeated addition as multiplication. To do so, we played
a game called How Long, How Many?

This game calls on them to roll the dice once to see HOW LONG of a paper
strip to pull out from the pile and then roll it again to see HOW MANY
of these strips they need to use. Once they have the strips they set them
up as an array, find a spot on their game board to place the array, trace it,
and label it as a multiplication problem. The goal is to cover as much of
the game board as possible before you become stuck (unable to place
your next array due to lack of space).

Once they were stuck they added up all the arrays to see how many
squares they filled in total. This provided a great opportunity to add a
series of numbers and regroup. They'll eventually be called on to find out how
many squares of the hundred were left blank. For this, they'll need to use
their growing understanding of subtraction with regrouping.

That's it for this week. Unbelievably, there are just three more weeks of school remaining. To the kids' credit they've been just as engaged and willing to work this month as ever. For my part I do my best to keep things predictable and consistent to stave off any cases of summer break fever. The end of second grade will come soon enough. No need to rush it!