The First 30 Days

It has been a very busy first month of school for my students and myself! There has been so many times that I have thought about typing a blog post, but became distracted with other ‘must-dos’. L It’s Sunday, and usually I go to a body sculpt class at the Y, but I am going to skip that today to relax, watch some football, and share some of our exciting projects.

This year I am blessed with the opportunity to teach the advanced math class. For my county this mean that the first unit I teach is a ‘recap’ of the first semester math standards, then I start teaching unit 4 (addition & subtraction with regrouping). Basically, by January I will be teaching 3rd grade math to my class. I was super pumped when I found out this was the plan… I LOVE curriculum and am excited to teach third grade standards to my second graders.

In the recap unit I had to cover place value, of course. This is one of my favorite units, and I was kind of sad we had to ‘fast forward’ through it. We still had fun though!

During math centers the kids practiced writing numbers in standard, expanded, and word form on the Activboard.

  

Math is an easy subject to incorporate food into…. and FOOD = FUN! I gave each kid a three-digit number. They had to write it in standard, expanded, and word form. Then, they got to build it using BIG Cheese-It’s (hundreds), pretzel sticks (tens), and chocolate chips (ones).

In Social Studies we learn all about our state: Georgia! The first unit is all about how Georgia is unique. They learn about the five regions, landforms, and rivers. Our culminating project is a salt-dough map of the state.

 

The dough is made out of flour,  salt, warm water, and a bit of oil. I made two batches the night before to save instructional time. 
The first day they cut out their maps of Georgia and glue it to cardboard. I gave them each a handful of dough to spread across their map. They had to pinch the dough to form mountains in the regions where they are located.

Day two involved painting the maps. First, they painted to entire map green. Next, they used red to outline the regions and blue to draw the rivers. Last, they painted the mountains brown. I am very thankful that I had a parent volunteer to help out, in addition to my team-teacher and a parapro.

Although, my class this year is very chatty, they LOVE to learn! I love their eagerness, it gets me excited every morning when my alarm goes off!