Spiders, spiders, spiders

Have you seen our spider board?  We spent the week researching spiders and created a fact board complete with nonfiction text features to showcase our work.  We worked on creating illustrations and captions, a table of contents, an index and a glossary.  When you read a nonfiction book with your child, talk about any of these features - and how they help the reader locate information.

Here's a great article about a GIANT spider!  We read the article in class and answered 5W questions (who, what, when, where, why - and how!) about the text.  Click on the image to read the article for yourself.

Nonfiction books are a fun way to introduce your child to different genres.  Kids of all ages love finding facts about things they enjoy.  Have you read any great nonfiction books lately?

Addition Strategies

It's hard to believe it's October already!  We spent this week reading fiction stories with a fall theme and focusing on the setting.  We also finished up our math unit on addition strategies.

It is important for second graders to know their math facts (addition and subtraction to and from 20) quickly - without having to count.  We talk about being able to "see it and say it" when doing math facts.  We also worked on many different strategies to help us "use what we know" when figuring out math facts.  Here is a picture of the anchor chart we created that hangs in our room.

This chart acts a reference for quickly solving math facts.  When practicing math facts with your child, see if they can tell you a quick strategy to use to find the answer - instead of counting on all the time.  The faster your child can master these facts, the easier math will be when we introduce new concepts and skills.

 

Looking for more practice?  Here are 3 fun sites to visit to make learning facts more fun! Click on the image to head to the game.

 

 

Have fun!