Welcome to the Wild West!

Today we started our Wild West 6 week unit. All the second grade teachers dressed up in our cowgirl outfits. Students saw pictures from the Wild West in the 1800's and we talked about how they used wagons for transportation instead of cars like today. We started out the unit by reading a tall tale called "Pecos Bill". All week we will be talking about and reading tall tales. Our Vocabulary words are: interrupted, promised, wander, borrowed, and mumbled.

We also had a structured math talk. I posed a problem with a missing part. Students had to use different strategies to find the missing part. We talked about using subtraction, using addition facts that we already know, and using the part part whole method.

Change is a good thing!

We now have five new students in our classroom. We are so happy to have them join the fun! We also got desks today instead of tables. A lot of changes, but we are all adjusting and beginning to settle in.

Math Learning Lab

Our classroom has the opportunity to be the math learning lab this year. This is a very exciting opportunity for the students. They did awesome on our first lab day! Mr.Tash is the best practices trainer for math and he worked with the students on using mental math to solve addition and subtraction. He also talked about making problems easier by applying your prior knowledge. If you know your doubles facts, you can can easily solve a doubles plus 1 problem.( 2+2=4. 2+3=5)
In best practices, we do not TELL the kids what they are learning. The kids discover their learning through exploration and reasoning. We always have to make sense of the math and justify why the answer is correct or why our method works. The students are learning how to have group discussions about math. They can agree and disagree with one another as well as help each other out when they are confused. I am so excited about how much my students are going to grow this year in math!!