Update

We have been busy using our awesome brains in the last two weeks. Along the way, we've done some pretty neat stuff that I wanted to share with you.

Economics and Communities

We broke up into groups and created communities with tax money. Some groups had rural communities, some suburban, and some urban. The rural communities had the least money and the urban community had the most, related to how many people could be taxed. Each group had a sheet with things they needed to build, such as police stations, fire departments, and schools. Each community had to have utilities such as power lines, sewage, and water treatment facilities. To keep track of their spending, the kids used calculators and a ledger.

After balancing their budgets, the students began building their communities by drawing on poster boards. They used the ledgers as a guide. They weren't allowed to build anything they hadn't paid for. Along the way, the students learned how difficult it is to plan communities and how communities with more people have more than those with less people.

Damien and Aubree named theirs "Labor City" where every day is Labor Day. Nice!

Here is a video that the kids have been begging me to put on the blog.

Math

We are still working with learning how to decompose numbers and combine them to add and subtract. This is the building block of regrouping, which is huge for 2nd grade. It helps the students see that when you're carrying, it's not just a 1, it's actually a 10. To help us practice, we played a math game called Race to 100, which is a very simple game you could play at home. All you need is 2 dice. Your child would love to teach you!

Writing

Next week, we will begin our Memoir or Personal Narrative study, but we wanted to get an initial published piece accomplished so we better understood the process that authors go through. These are choice pieces. Some kids chose to write nonfiction, others fiction. The important thing was moving through the process of making revisions and editing so an audience can better understand it. These pieces will be shorter than the personal narratives we will write beginning next week. I'm very excited about the Memoir study. One suggestion is to help your child come up with some ideas of important and meaningful memories that are just begging to be written.

Reading

We have been looking closely at reading responses such as summarizing and predicting. We also are practicing reading strategies such as chunking words, looking at spelling patterns, and skipping the word to read around it. As a chapter book read aloud, we have been reading Frindle by Andrew Clements. 

Explorations Pics

And this last pic is of Anna, Maiya, and me bringing back the colonial look.