Tomorrow will be a fabulous day for a picnic! I want to say thank you again to our fabulous room parents Nicole and Donna. I know I couldn't have gotten through this year without you!
So we're down to 14 days of school. Did you hear that sound? It's the school year flying by. This week you will find the kids Open Court workbooks in your child's Friday Folder.
We have been working on money this week. Tonight I told them that if they brought information back about the quarter from the internet they could get an eagle card. Thank you to all of the kids, Ryan, Lily, and Genevieve who brought in research on the dime. We discovered that FDR is on the front or head of the coin. On the back or tail of the coin are three pictures: a torch representing liberty, olive leaves representing peace, and oak leaves representing strength. Below the picture are the words e pluribus unum meaning, "United we stand." We also learned that the word dime is derived from the Latin word decimus meaning one tenth. Today in our review of the dime many kids were able to earn an eagle card for being a "smarty pants" and remembering some of this information about a dime.
We also learned a song about money in order to remember which coin is which. I remember that many of my second graders had a hard time remembering which coin was which so I thought I would make up a little song to remind them and give them clues. That way when they needed to identify coins they could recall this song.
Money Song
(to the tune of the Farmer in the Dell)
A penny's worth one cent!
A penny's worth one cent!
It's small and brown
and smooth around
A penny's worth one cent!
A nickel's worth five cents!
A nickel's worth five cents!
It's a silver coin
and smooth around
A nickel's worth five cents!
A dime is worth ten cents!
A dime is worth ten cents!
It's small and silver
with bumps around
A dime is worth ten cents!
A quarter's twenty-five cents!
A quarter's twenty-five cents!
It's large and round
with bumps around
A quarter's twenty-five cents!
I also introduced some of the parts of speech this week. We talked about a noun being a person, place, or thing, an adjective being a describing word, a verb being an action word, and a prepositional phrase being where everything took place. After introducing the terms the kids brainstormed words to fit into each category. Then using this pattern
adj, adj, noun
adj, adj, noun
adj, adj, adj, noun, verb, prepositional phrase.
We then sang it to the tune of Farmer in the Dell (I really like that tune). You might have heard songs about ladybugs and butterflies. We wrote a song for Officer Anton for career day yesterday.
The brave, friendly police officer
The brave, friendly police officer
The brave, friendly, caring police officer rode a motorcycle on the road.
You can use this model and have your child make up all kinds of cool sentences. I got all of these great ideas from the GLAD conference I went to last Thursday and Friday. It's always so great when you can apply the strategies you learned right away!
This week was our last library check out. Please return the books on Monday!
