Five for Friday: October 10th

 I think it is a miracle that I am linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday on a Friday for two weeks in a row.  With the full harvest moon, my week was a little crazy.  I am so thankful it is the weekend! 

We are continuing our unit about Thinking Like a Scientist. This week we focused on magnets. The conversations my students were having about the magnets attracting and repelling were amazing. I love to hear my little second graders using academic language with each other.
We started the week with an exploration activity from Kristen Smith’s Force and Motion unit. I placed bags if items at each table, and my students predicted which items would be magnetic and which would be non-magnetic. After the predictions were made, they were able to test with a magnet. They were all amazed that a pipe cleaner is magnetic.


The next day we focused on the push and pull of magnets due to the poles. First, we read about magnetic force in a ScienceA-Z book. (If you love ReadingA-Z, you'll love their science resources too). 

After reading, my students explored the push and pull of magnets. Some students discovered how to make the magnets jump. Others discovered that the magnetic force could work through their hand.

I loved watching how engaged and amazed they all were.
To further the discussion about magnets repelling and attracting, I used an idea from Kids Science Experiments where I attached magnets to the tops of toy cars. My students took turns controlling the cars with magnets. They loved it!


In math, we are jumping into adding with regrouping. We focus on multiple methods at our school, so we began with building the addition problems with base ten blocks. 

This really helped solidify the idea of addition and regrouping ten ones for a ten. My students worked together to practice this on the second day. They worked great and helped each other understand the problems.


Then we moved on to drawing the addition problems. My students are great at drawing numbers in base ten form, but drawing the addition problems and regrouping step took a lot of explicit instruction. It helped that they had the hands-on experience already.
 

I am working on increasing the use of academic language in student discourse and writing, so math journals have become a big part of our classroom. I often have students find the error in a procedure and explain what was wrong in words. The journal responses for addition with regrouping were great.