• Home
  • Classroom Spotlight
  • Contact Information
  • Birthdays at School
  • Accelerated Reader Links
  • Morgan Hill Unified Home Page
  • Home and School Club
  • Nordstrom
Room 11: Elevate and Excel!

Open House

4/30/2017

0 Comments

 
     Thank you families for coming to Open House on Wednesday night.  We had 100 percent participation in our classroom.  It was a great night to celebrate all the accomplishments of our second grade class.  We still have more than a month left to work hard and learn more in room 4.
     
This week the students experienced an assembly with wild cats.  For once, I was happy to be in the back row when the presenter brought in a full-grown cheetah for the students to observe hear facts about this magnificent animal.  Ask your child what he learned about the wild cats that we saw on Friday.
     Our ABC Reader volunteer came to the class and read "Enemy Pie" by Derek Munson.  In the story a boy seeks his father's help to get rid of an enemy.  His father has the perfect answer.  He will cook an enemy pie while his son goes and spends an entire day with his "best enemy."  Dad makes the perfect pie and his son learns a valuable lesson in making friends.  
     
We researched different types of entomologists jobs and wrote a paragraph about our learning.  We learned about mighty earthworms and how they take care of the planet by aerating the soil and helping to decompose waste.
     On Thursday after open house we went on a tour of the  third grade classrooms in preparation for the coming school year.  
     In math have been demonstrating multiplicative relationships with tables and comparing situations that look different, but have the same equal group structure.

     Our classroom butterflies are in the pupa stage and should emerge this coming week.
​    We are practicing our songs for the Spring Concert coming up on May 23!






0 Comments

Every Day Is Earth Day

4/22/2017

0 Comments

 
     In celebration of Earth Day students learned about the layers of the earth and ways to take care of our planet.  Ask your child some ways he or she learned to help take care of the earth.  We made a model of the earth out of clay.  Your child should be able to tell you some facts about the different earth layers.  
     In math we are exploring equal groups as we continue to lay the foundations for multiplication.  We are working with cubes to make buildings.  Each building has the same number of rooms (cubes) on each floor in the same configuration.  We are using tables to figure out the total number of rooms each building contains based on the number of floors.  Then we consider the multiplicative relationships in the tables and consider why some tables look the same even though they represent different building designs.  All this hands-on modeling with cube arrays helps students develop their understanding of arrays and is an important step in developing student understanding of why the dimensions of a rectangle can be multiplied to determine the area, work they will encounter in grade 3 and beyond.  
     We had another pocket day this week.  This time students worked with a list of classroom names.  Students stated how many pockets they had and we wrote down the number next to the student's name.  Then students added up all 23 numbers to figure out the total number of pockets.  This was great practice using their math facts.  When we finished doing our own addition, we learned how to use a Google Sheet to add a column of numbers.  
     Please mark your calendars to attend our Open House this Wednesday evening.  
0 Comments

Foundations of Multiplication

4/16/2017

0 Comments

 
   In second grade math we lay the foundation for multiplication and division.  Students with a solid foundational understanding of using repeated addition, forming equal groups, skip counting, and odd and even numbers are better prepared for the higher level multiplication and division concepts taught in third grade and beyond.  This week students learned about even and odd numbers.  They formed pairs using various numbers and discovered that odd and even numbers have different characteristics.  Ask your child to determine whether a number is odd or even and how he or she knows.
     We have live butterfly larvae in the classroom and will be observing the life cycle of a painted lady butterfly and recording our findings in our insect journals.  We wrote about our field trip to Vasona Park and worked on diagrams to accompany our insect reports.  We will be working busily the for the next few days on getting ready for open house.  
    


0 Comments

    Author

    Hello, I am Renee De Villez.  This page is about the activities going on in my classroom.  My audience consists of the parents of the students in my class.  Other parents and teachers are welcome to read it as well.  

    Archives

    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.