Bi-weekly update October 23rd

Reader's Workshop
We did a crossword puzzle with words that have the letter o in them. Some were the short o sound (as in hot), some were the long o sound (as in home), and some were the ow sound (as in now).

We continued to work in our spelling groups, practicing words with rainbow writing, making them with tiles and stamps, and checking ourselves with Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check!

We discussed the types of features found in informational texts. These include a title, maps, photographs, illustrations, diagrams, captions, cross-sections, labels, and others!

We compared two authors, Gail Gibbons and Peter Brown, using a Venn Diagram. We identified areas of commonality and difference in their genres and styles.

Writer's Workshop
We wrapped up our first narrative writing unit by changing the beginnings of our stories. A good way to start a story is to use an action, a thought, a sound, or dialogue. Everyone picked one of these strategies and wrote a new beginning to a story they were working on.

We also practiced using a checklist to check our writing work.

Next, we will be writing informational pieces about bees!

Math
These two weeks, we worked on addition some more. We are doing 3-digit addition with regrouping in all places. Students are becoming very accurate and quick!

Please practice addition and subtraction facts to 20 at home! Some of the mistakes children are making have to do with simple addition facts such as 3 + 2.

Science
Our work this time focused on liquids and solids. We compared the two with a Venn diagram, came up with a definition of a liquid, and thought about what happens when you heat up a liquid.

Next, we worked on floating and sinking. See our other blog post for more details on that!

Social Studies
We continued to look at maps and geography. We talked about keys, made maps of the playground, and looked at Massachusetts, our neighborhoods, and our country. Try looking at a map (even one on a computer) before taking a drive or a walk somewhere, and show your student where you plan to go and how you chose that plan. You can even have them come up with a plan, and track your progress as you go.

Zooming out, way out

This is a video from Charles and Ray Eames from 1977, showing an aerial view zooming out, and then back in. We have been studying maps, and have been making maps of small-scale places: the classroom, the school, the playground. We are starting to zoom out, though, looking at a map of Massachusetts (and practicing spelling it!) and then looking at the whole world later this week.



You can describe our address in the same way, starting small and local and moving to larger and larger scales of reference.

room	Room 204
school	JR Lowell School
address	175 Orchard Street
city	Watertown
state	Massachusetts
country	United States of America
continent	North America
planet	Earth
solar system	The Solar System
galaxy	The Milky Way
galaxy group	The Local Group
universe	The Universe

Bi-weekly Update, October 9

Reader's Workshop
We have been studying narrative and informational texts. Narratives are stories, and texts aren't just things you write on your phone. Any piece of writing is a text! They don't all include emoji, though. We studied the author and illustrator Peter Brown to find examples of narrative texts. The writers of narrative texts want to entertain you.

We are reading books by the author and illustrator Gail Gibbons to study informational texts. In an informational text, the author's purpose is to teach you something. Next week, we will be looking at features of informational texts, and using a Venn Diagram to compare the similarities and differences between narrative and informational texts.

We mapped out two of Gail Gibbons' books, The Boat Book and My Soccer Book. To do this, we didn't use a story map, like we did with Peter Brown's books. We used an informational text map.

When we start writing informational texts ourselves, we will map them out beforehand with this same tool.

Writer's Workshop
We continue to write narratives. Students have some very interesting (and sometimes creepy!) problems in their stories. We talked about using "star" words: words that are exceptional and interesting and you wouldn't normally use them. We looked at examples of books where authors use star words. Peter Brown, Christopher van Allsburg, and Kevin Henkes all use this type of word frequently! We also looked at some examples of stories that include feelings. We made a list of different feeling words, and used them in our narratives, too.

Math
We are learning about addition! We can add two three digit numbers together in a fast and accurate way. We are working on reading and understanding story problems involving addition, too.

Try giving your student two three digit numbers to add together (with an answer that is less than 1,000), and see how they do!

Science
We developed and completed a self-assessment of our work with raisins. Here's what we looked for:

We started to learn about matter. Matter is the stuff that everything in the universe is made up of. Matter can exist in one of four phases: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasmas are found in extremely hot environments, such as the sun, so we won't be experimenting with those! Most of our work in the next few weeks will focus on solids and liquids.

We compared water and a wooden block, conducting the same experiments in the same way with both materials to have a fair test. We tried dropping the block, dropping the water, dropping a block on the block, dropping a block on the water, and dropping water on the block.

Social Studies
We are looking at and constructing maps!

We also learned about early migration and settling of the Americas 15,000 years ago by the peoples who became the modern-day Native Americans. They lived in North and South America for many thousands of years without people in the rest of the world knowing that there was land or people there. We learned that the earliest explorers and settlers from Europe were the Vikings, who sailed to Greenland and Canada more than 1,000 years ago. They built small villages here, and eventually left or died out, and few people outside of their world found out. Finally, the European explorer Christopher Columbus sailed westward in 1492, looking for a sea trade route to Asia. Instead, he found some islands in the Caribbean, and - on subsequent voyages - landed in the Yucatan peninsula and what is now Brazil.

Number(s) of the Week
7 - We have seven senses! I always thought we had 5 (smell, touch, taste, hearing, seeing) but I learned this summer that we have two more: vestibular and proprioceptive. The vestibular sense relates to our understanding and feeling gravity and movement. The proprioceptive sense is our understanding of where the parts of our body are in space. My 7-month-old son is still developing his proprioceptive skills when he tries to grab objects.

93,000,000 - We are about 93 million miles away from the sun. This is an approximate number, and the exact number changes depending on where we are in our elliptical orbit of the sun.

Other important information
We visited the garden! Check out the blog post about that.

Garden tour

The colleagues in Lab 204 took a tour of our research garden on Thursday. We met our garden coordinator, Dr. Judy, who showed us around. We saw many plants, some insects, a moth, and a toad! We made observational drawings of what we saw. Some of us tried a very long red bean.

Soon, we will be returning to the garden to plant some tulip bulbs as a part of the Journey North project, where we will measure and share data about when the bulbs emerge in the spring and how much they grow.

Toad in the garden from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

Mapping, part 1

In social studies right now, we are studying maps and map making. We discussed what a map is, and went from initial definitions like "A map is a piece of paper that helps you when you get lost." to a working class definition: an overhead view of a place. We imagined we were a robin, hopping in a field, and then we flew up into the sky and imagined looking down at the world below.

We said you could make a map of many things:
- a classroom
- a house
- a cave system
- the Blue Hills
- the Grand Canyon
- a park
- a zoo
- America
- a forest
- a flag factory
- the White House
- Brazil
- Long Island
- Florida
- a bedroom
- a lost island
- Canobie Lake Park
- the world
- Moxley Park
- a board game
- Faire on the Square
- the library
A map could be of a real place or of an imaginary one.

Next, we looked at a variety of maps used by a variety of people. In a small group, students discussed what they noticed, what they thought it was a map of, and who would use that map. We looked at a aeronautical chart of the airspace near Montreal, a hiking map of the Great Glen Way in Scotland, a map of Mount Everest, a map of Reykjavik, a road map of California, a map of NPR radio stations across the country, and a USGS topographic map from upstate New York. We noticed that all of these had a key that showed what different symbols meant.

Next, we drew a map of our classroom. We imagined a giant took the roof off, and we were looking down at the room from above. It was tricky to remember to draw the tops of everything, since we are so used to drawing what things look like from the side!

Our last task was to draw a map of our whole school. This was hard! We took a walk through every part of the school so we could see everything.

Next week, we will begin using maps to learn about the whole world: the difference between a continent and a country, a number of notable land features, and the location of the three countries we will study this year, India, Egypt, and Brazil.

The first three weeks!

The first three weeks of school have flown by! The students in Room 204 have been hard at work: reading, writing, drawing, discussing, comparing, solving, playing, and thinking. We are working on building our class culture, learning school routines, and developing rules to live by. We have been kind and friendly, curious and careful.

Housekeeping News:

Back to school night is next Thursday, October 1st. Second grade starts in the gym at 6:30 pm for a presentation by Ms. Kaplan, then goes to classrooms from 6:45 to 7:15, then visits the specialists in the cafeteria from 7:15 to 7:45.

School Site Council meets next Monday in the Library from 7 to 8 pm.

Check out Ms. Kaplan's blog for regular school updates and news: http://mskaplanlowell.blogspot.com/

Check out our class website: bit.ly/204rocks

blog: bit.ly/204blog

and Instagram: @lowell204

Here's a quick overview of what we've been working on so far. For more pictures (and videos!) check out our blog: bit.ly/204blog

Reader's Workshop

We are reading a variety of narratives. We started with books about school (Chrysanthemum, Clark the Shark, and I Was a Second Grade Werewolf, among others), moved on to some fun Mo Willems books, and began an author study of Peter Brown.

We also started learning some of the routines and activities we will be using during word study this year.

Writer's Workshop

We started the year writing true stories about our summers. We discussed and practiced making a graphic organizer to plan out a story before writing, making a list of ideas, adding detail, changing words from boring to amazing, and practicing spelling tricky words on the back of our paper. We also widened the scope of what we can write about. Instead of just focusing on true personal narratives, some children are choosing to write fictional narratives so they can develop story problems and solutions.

Math

Our first math unit of the year has focused on reading, writing, understanding, and comparing three-digit numbers up to 1,000. We also added and subtracted 1, 10, and 100 from three-digit numbers.

We also had a problem solving challenge involving some hippos and a board book that Mr. MacLellan reads to his six-month-old son. Ask your student how they did!

At home, you can use a deck of cards to play two games we have played in class:

Double Compare - divide the deck in half, pull the top two cards, add the values together, and compare with your opponent. The player with the greater value takes the cards, as long as they remember to say "___ is greater than ___". With a normal deck of cards, aces can be 1 and the face cards can be wild cards.

Highest 3 out of 6 - Each player starts with 6 cards in front of them. You need to make the highest three-digit number you can with digits on your cards. After both players make their highest three-digit number, they compare, just as they did in Double Compare. A normal deck of cards adds an extra element to the game, as 10s can push the numbers into the thousands!

You can also quiz your student on combinations to make 10 and adding 1, 10, and 100 to any three-digit number.

Social Studies

We talked about behaviors and actions we want to see in school, and are developing a list of rules to live by in second grade. These will be rules that apply to our behavior anywhere we are, in school and out. Once we settle on language and categories we agree on, we will sign our names to a classroom agreement.

Additionally, we discussed our hopes for the year, and ways that we want to grow as students.

Science

We are working on science skills, especially developing questions, making observations, discussing what we notice and wonder, and self-assessing the quality of our work.

Check out the video about our raisin experiment on our blog to see more!

We have a great year ahead of us!

visit our website: sites.google.com/site/lowellroom204

read our blog: lowellroom204.blogspot.com

follow us on Instagram: @lowell204

Observational drawing

Observation is an essential skill for successful science education. We develop this skill in Lab 204 by focusing on drawing what we notice. In our science drawings, we are careful, precise, exact, and specific. We draw exactly what we see, and include many details that we otherwise would have overlooked. Here, we are using our science observation notebooks to draw some of the plants in our room.