Geometry

Our math focus took a new turn this week: geometry!  We have been working on identifying and describing two dimensional and three dimensional shapes.  They have really enjoyed reviewing shapes with this Teacher Tipster video/chant.  In our study, we are distinguishing between shapes by learning the different attributes like how many flat surfaces, vertices, and edges.  Some of the shapes we have studied are sphere, cone, pyramid, cylinder, cube, and rectangular prism. Below, the students are counting vertices and edges.  Then we played a game where the students had to identify the shape blindfolded!  They did awesome!

With 2D shapes we studied circles, squares, rectangles, rhombuses, ovals, trapezoids, pentagons, hexagons, and octagons. The children loved to create new shapes and pictures by arranging different 2D shapes together.  The students used our class's Osmos and pattern blocks for building difficult shape puzzles.  They are getting very skilled at using slides, flips, and turns to create designs.

On Friday, we had the opportunity to check out the Chromebook lab.  We have been missing our computer lab time the last couple weeks because the intermediate students are testing.  With the lab, the students took the first bit to practice their typing skills, then we got to play interactive games to review our geometry learning.  Click on the links below to give them a try!

Find the Shape

Shape Sort

Find the Shape

Shape Shoot
Starfall Geometry

March Book Madness

 We did a March Madness with book battles to coincide with the NCAA basketball tournament.  This Friday was our championship book battle, but the brackets began weeks ago with the Sweet 16.  The Sweet 16 match ups included: Green Eggs and Ham vs Cat in the Hat, Dog-Gone School vs What a Wonderful World (poetry bracket), Ron's Big Mission vs Salt in His Shoes (biography bracket), The Sun vs If You Decide to Go to the Moon (informational text), Fortunately vs Stick and Stone, Grandfather's Teeth vs Steal Back the Mona Lisa (mystery bracket), My Pet Dragon vs Me and My Dragon (fantasy bracket), and Cinderella vs Rumpelstiltskin (fairy tale bracket). We would read each book and then take a vote on the favorite.  From these match ups, we got an Elite 8.

With 8 books in the running we opened up voting to the entire first and second grade.  Again, each classroom would read both books and take votes.  With 120 kids now participating and voting, it took a little longer, but we soon had a Final Four.

When we reread the Final Four match ups we got together as a grade level.  When votes were tabulated, we were ready for the championship game on Friday.  It would be Dog-Gone School vs Rumpelstiltskin.  The entire first and second grade gathered together Friday morning.  Mrs. Niemeyer read Dog-Gone School and Mrs. Brinkman read Rumpelstiltskin.  

For the last vote, the children not only had to vote but they had to give a reason why the book should be our 2016 Book of the Year.  The winner was Dog-Gone School!  Pretty exciting!  We never would have guessed a book of poetry would be the winner!  Thanks for the great participation first and second grade!

Ms. Frey and I couldn't let the basketball theme go...so we kept playing right into math!  For math on Friday we had a shoot out and worked on our graphing skills.  First we let each class take a shot and we made a tally graph of hits and misses.  Ms. Frey's class won the class shoot out. 

 

Then we put the children in groups of three with a bucket and a ball.  Between the team, they had to shot, tally, graph, and interpret their results.  It looked like chaos but all the students were engaged in collecting, interpreting, and analyzing data.  We could definitely see evidence of learning when we combined our data on a large graph and had a rich mathematical discussion about the results. 

Hook, Line, and Sinker!

Yes, this is how our April  began....with a hunt to see the elusive Lirpaloof Bird.  The students learned some important characteristics like you can only see the bird at the beginning of April, Lirpaloofs like carrots, and, don't forget, you can not yell at the Lirpaloof.  You must sing to it.  The students read all about it in an article.  The students studied hard so that we would be successful on our sight seeing tour.

Unfortunately,  there were no lirpaloofs out when we were searching.  So, the students returned to the classroom and we decided to do some word work with the word Lirpaloof.  We worked to find as many words as we could in the word using the letters in Lipaloof.  The students used the Word Wizard app to help them and recorded the different words they found on a paper and on the board.  

After about 15 minutes, the students had made over 25 words.  When they were sharing together, it dawned on the....Lirpaloof was April fool backwards!  Gotcha!