WWW.IXL.COM

IXL is a math website that our school uses for students to practice grade level math skills. Your children use IXL once a week as a whole class to practice skills we are working on in our math studies and then once more during their math center rotation each week. I will list the usernames here for students to access but their password is their birthday as in MMDDYY. My password would be 031187 for example. 

Abdirizak- a19007

Fardowsa- f22486

Ryan- r17297

Dalton- d21499

Gidhan- g20408

Erin- e18534

Abdi- a18605

Yasmin- y19209

Binti- b18607

Xavier- x19386

Sierra- s18547

Rukia- r15603

Faisal- f18552

Sabrina- s18553

Amiira- a18557

John- j17924

Sam- s18565

Kayla- k18524

Brady- b19061

Tristan- t18508

Trinaty- t20498

Reaching for the Stars

I have been meaning to get this picture up for a while now, but haven't gotten to it until now. After looking through our NWEA scores as a class, students were able to see how their scores on the math, reading, and language tests this fall compared to the end of the year scores in second grade. While it is common for students to not make huge gains during the summer when they are out of school, a lot of your children were surprised by the test scores that they did see.

To prepare for looking at student scores, we used practice scores and bar graphs to compare data and learn about why teachers keep track of NWEA scores. Students graphed fake student scores and practiced making goals for the imaginary students based on what they saw. After we became familiar with those scores and the way they were graphed, students looked at their own scores and made real goals for themselves. They picked one test they wanted to improve the most and picked a strategy they could practice to help them improve that test score. Examples might be:

• I want to be better at reading so I will practice choosing just right books.
• I want to be better at math, so I will practice counting money.
• I want to be better at language, so I will practice using periods, question marks, and exclamation points. 

We traced our arms and wrote our goals on them. We decorated around our goals and hung them on a piece of black butcher paper with stars because we are aiming high with our goals, and reaching for the stars.  We know we will meet our goals on this winter's NWEA test because we see this poster every day and are reminded of what we need and want to do to make our scores go up. 

Self Portraits

Just because they look so cool, we wanted to post some pictures of the self portraits we did with Ms. Gibbons in art class this year... I hung them up in the hall way this past week and all the teachers and students walking by have commented on our display. Aren't they beautiful?

This student's face guards the classroom door. Do you recognize who it is?

Math Word Wall

Just so you know how we're remembering all those important math words we've been learning this year.... here is our magnetic math word wall. This wall helps us to remember all the important math terms we are learning and how to spell them!

Community Circles Are Up!

Students have finally completed the community circles we have been working on for the past few weeks! We have circles that describe our home community, school communities, Lewiston, Maine, United States and earth communities. Each of the communities has a drawing on the front describing it and a written description on the back. What and how much was written depends on what community the students were describing. 

Home and school communities were easy because students are there all the time and know lots about them. The circles were also relatively small so students didn't have to write as much. When working on our Lewiston circle, students did research independently or with a partner on Spruce pod laptops. We also had a classmate whose parents own a business in downtown Lewiston that we wrote about. At the end of our research, the class combined all of our new found information on an anchor chart that we hung in the room. We researched Maine using books from the school library- desk partners took five minutes to search through a book before passing it to the next set of desk partners and looking through a new book. We read a big book about the United States and looked through the social studies text book website http://sf.factmonster.com/atlas/unitedstates.html, taking notes together;and last, we watched a video about earth on Brain Pop Jr.'s website twice and took notes about what we learned. 

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

 Students finished their peanut butter and jelly stories this October and had their first Author's Tea of the year. We gathered during writing workshop, ate Sunbutter and jelly sandwiches with milk, and listened to one another read our stories. Some stories were funny. Some stories gave very specific instructions and some stories told us what we already know. All of the stories were wonderfully written though and we are very excited to host another Author's Tea at the end of November for our personal narratives. 

 Here are some awesome stories hanging on the Sprucetastic Work board. One student printed his cover on the computer! 

Commutative Property Addition

When we started unit 2 in our math text this year, I was worried. The opening lesson was about the three properties of addition: associative, commutative, and identity. How many of you parents know what all three of those properties are?! I know I didn't learn these terms at that age! 

The most difficult property to practice in our class was the commutative property. It says that no matter how I arrange a set of addends in a number sentence they always are the same and have the same sum. For example: (5 + 3) + 2 = (5 + 2) + 3 = (3 + 2) + 5 = 10... Wowzah!! Confusing! 

The easiest way to look at this property was to use counting bears. We had one color for each addend in the problem and switched them around using our desk and a piece of tape that split it in half. We used a post it to mark our thinking about the numbers on our desk. So one side of our desk might have those 5 blue bears and 3 green bears that we talked about in the problem up above and the other side might have the 2 red bears. But no matter what is on each side of the tape we knew our entire desk had 10 bears on it. Do you get it now? I sure hope so! We're having a test soon and we have been working hard to master these skills...