Dear Families,

We’re very excited about this evening’s music concert, and hope you can all join us. Your child should meet me in the classroom at 6:15, and the concert will begin promptly at 6:30. The children have been working very hard, and with great enthusiasm with Mr. Close, their music teacher.

January has whizzed by—just as the school year seems to be doing. It’s almost the 100^th day of school. We plan to celebrate this on Monday, Feb. 4^th. Between now and then, please help your child put together a collection of 100 small items. The collection could be pennies, paperclips, marbles, coupons, etc. Please have him or her bring this collection in a bag on Monday, February 4^th. We will use the collections for a variety of activities, including categorizing, organizing, and finding counting patterns to 100.

Speaking of celebrations, Valentines’ Day is right around the corner. We will celebrate this day of friendship by exchanging Valentine/Friendship cards with each other. Your child may want to get started on this project ahead of time by either making cards or purchasing store-bought cards for his/her classmates. A list of classmate names is attached to this newsletter to help your child remember to give each classmate a card. We will be making ice cream on this day. I will be asking families to donate an item or ingredient to help us with this project. Stay tuned…

Class List

J.R.,  Zac, Colin, Grace, Erin, Jennifer, Hannah, Anna, Christie, Anthony, Cyrus Z., Cyrus B., Seth, Matthew, Colin, Cheyanne

Math for second graders has consisted of several word problems helping them to identify patterns that are occurring, and keeping track of running totals as they create charts to keep their information organized. Some of the problems asked us to find the "trend" of temperature changes over a period of time. Others asked us to find out what would happen if a particular pattern continued for a two-week period. An example of this type of problem reads: If Ann scored two points on Monday, three points on Tuesday, two points on Wednesday, three points on Thursday, and this pattern continued, how many points would she have scored altogether in a two-week period? There are many things a child needs to know in order to be successful with this problem. It’s necessary to know how many days are in a two-week period, that there is a 2,3,2,3 pattern and how to set this up in chart form with a running total, the order of the days of the week beginning with Monday and ending with Sunday, and to repeat this days of the week pattern again, or find that you can double the answer after 7 days have been listed on the chart. Once the solution is reached, a child needs to know how to answer the question that was asked by writing a complete and accurate statement. Children are also asked to think about and communicate a "connection" to these problems. For example, "IF this pattern continued for a third week, Ann would have scored a total of ____ points."

Other types of word problems we’ve worked on are called "accrued time" problems using minutes and hours. These problems require knowing that 60 minutes equals 1 hour, and that two hours is 120 minutes. They also encourage being able to add groups of minutes, such as 10’s 15’s and 20’s in order to find exact hours and minute amounts. An example of an accrued time problem is: If Jimmy had 1 hour of free time and the following activities take the allotted amount of time, what are two different ways he could fill an entire hour?

Draw for 10 minutes

Read for 15 minutes

Build with Legos for 20 minutes.

Using a chart that is set up with the activity, time spent and running total of minutes used is one way a child can demonstrate how to solve this problem. A connection might be stating, "If Jimmy had 1 ½ hours of free time, he could also build with Legos for another 20 minutes and draw for 10 minutes."

Just this week, we began to look at combination problems that ask us to find ways of keeping track of our work so we can find all of the different combinations a problem presents. For example, if Jen has three different colored shirts and two different colored shorts, how many different combinations of outfits does she have before she has to repeat an outfit? Many of us attempted to make an organized list to show our work, which led us to finding out about a new strategy called a "tree diagram." We are finding out that a tree diagram helps us find all of the different combinations without repeating any. Several of us also discovered that we can prove our answers to these combination problems by using multiplication. If there are three shirt choices and two short choices, we have a multiplication problem of 3 x 2 =6 or 2+2+2=6. Seeing these tree diagram problems as multiplication problems has been a discovery made by several children without any coaching from me!

The first graders continue to practice making a table or T-chart as a strategy one can use in order to find solutions to problems that have contain a pattern. We call it a T chart because we construct the chart using the letter T. The children are working on problems such as: "Farmer John was planting his garden. In the first row he planted peppers. In the second row he also planted peppers. In the third row he planted cucumbers. In the fourth row he planted peppers again. If this pattern continues, what will he plant in the tenth row?" There have been several challenges for the children while learning to construct a T-Chart. The first challenge is how to write the words first, second, third, fourth, etc using mathematical notation(1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, etc.) Perhaps the biggest challenge is to figure what to label each column. For the problem above, the T-chart would be labeled with rows and vegetables. We’ll be finishing up our work with these types of problems shortly. We have also played a card game called Money Compare. In this game children took turns flipping over cards. Each player counted the money on the card and then decided which player’s card had the most money. Money Bingo has also been another way we have practiced counting groups of coins. Did your child show you his or her paper with a menu from Orr’s Restaurant? The children had to pick an appetizer, main course, dessert and a beverage. They had to figure out how much their meal would cost and show the coins they would use to pay for their meal (Orr’s Restaurant happens to be a very inexpensive Restaurant where a meal costs less than a dollar!) This activity was inspired by a book we read called Pigs Will Be Pigs. In this story, the pigs wanted to go out to dinner. They didn’t have any money so they hunted around their home and found coins in many places. They added up the coins they found and had enough money to go out to dinner and order the "Special". We had quite a discussion about what a "Special" meant at a restaurant. Another day, there were many toys at the" Orr Store" and the children had to pick out toys and show which coins they would use to pay for the toys. Again, this was an inexpensive toy store! Please ask your child to tell you about some of these math activities.

Science for first and second grade continues to focus states of matter—specifically liquids and solids. When I was growing up, I believe there were only three states of matter discussed—liquids, solids and gases. NOW, I’ve discovered that there’s been five states of matter clearly identified with the addition of plasma in the mid-late 19^th century, and Bose-Einstein condensates, identified in 1995. For the purposes of our science curriculum at the primary grade level, we focus only on the liquids and solids because these can be seen and manipulated by young children easier than the other states or phases of matter. We can begin to look at gases using water vapor, since we can actually see this when water is heated to a certain temperature, but other studies of gas are too difficult to bring "REAL" in front of children. I’ve explained this to the children, and told them that scientists are making new discoveries every day, and as they get older they will may learn more about states or phases of matter. So…we’ve been looking at how liquids react without other liquids, how liquids react with a physical force, such as a change in temperature, and how liquids and solids react with each other. This week we’ve used a solid known as gelatin powder with apple juice and plain water in a variety of different quantities. The first time we made apple flavored "Jello." The next day we used only a little water and a lot less gelatin powder to see what would happen over time. We’re watching this experiment every day and hope to make a determination of what happens by the end of the week. Many of us thought that when we first added the juice or water to the gelatin powder that the gelatin or solid "disappeared" because we couldn’t see it anymore. In fact, we are learning that it dissolved and must still be in the liquid solution because the liquid changed from a liquid state to a more solid (although jiggly) state or phase after it cooled. The apple juice and water were no longer able to flow and take the shape of the container when moved around. Our conclusion so far is that sometimes the combination of a solid and a liquid creates a solid over time and with a cooling temperature change. Sometimes a solid looks like it’s not there anymore when added to a liquid, but we think it is still there because a change happened to the liquid. We are going to do a few more experiments with solids added to liquids to see if the solids actually disappear or remain in the liquid even if we can’t see them.

We are learning to set up FAIR tests or experiments, by determining variables that need to be consistent. We continue to practice our observation skills, and find ways to describe ONLY what we can see and measure. We are also learning to make predictions before experiments, and then make conclusions after we’ve made careful observations after repeating the same experiments several times.

January 31^st: Winter Concert with Mr. Close at 6:30. Please have your child meet me in our classroom at 6:15.