Pennies for Puerto Rico

Hello, Giraffe Families!

Our Random Acts of Kindness Club is collecting pennies to donate the Red Cross to help with hurricane relief in Puerto Rico. If you would like to donate any spare change you may have, you can send them in to our classroom by October 19th. The Club had previously stated that they only wanted to collect pennies, but they are now accepting all kinds of change :)

Thank you for helping to make our world a kinder place! 

Math Madness

For the last several weeks in math, we have been learning lots of strategies for adding and subtracting numbers. Fact families have played a huge part in our learning, so we created some fact family turkeys to decorate our classroom! 

In addition to using fact families to help us solve various adding and subtracting problems, we've also learned about and used these strategies to help our math brains:

• Tens Helper facts (if I know 8+2=10, I know 8+3=11)
• Doubles Helper Facts (If I know 6+6=12, 6+7=13)
• Counting up on a Number Grid
• Counting Back on a Number Grid
• Using a Number Line
• Using Base-10 Blocks

To practice these skills at home, students can play all the quizzes and games under the G and H sections of Second Grade IXL. For a challenge, students can also try out the games under the I and J sections! 

We've also learned how to play some great math games, which can also be played at home using the numbered cards in a card deck!

• The Penny Difference Game
• Salute!
• The Number Grid Difference Game
• Addition and Subtraction Top-It

All of these games involve a lot of luck to win, but they build awesome math skills while having fun!

Drops on a Penny with Mrs. Leonard

On Thursday, we finished our first rotation of Science Magic when we traveled to Mrs. Leonard's room and experimented with dropping water on pennies. We had no idea how much water the surface of the penny could hold!

Many of us got over 40 drops to fit on our penny before it finally spilled over. This site has ideas for how to extend the experiment at home: Steve Spangler Science. They suggest testing using other liquids or even other pennies to see if the results are different!

We are going to begin a second rotation of Science Magic in a few weeks, and this time our experiments will center around earth science! We can't wait :) 

Cleaning Pennies with Mrs. Caporello

On Wednesday, we continued traveling through second grade to explore science. We went to Mrs. Caporello's room, where she showed us how to clean the dull coating (also known as copper oxide) off of pennies using salt and vinegar!

One friend even tried out this experiment at home! This site has a lot of great ideas to extend this experiment even further: Science Bob. Thanks for sharing a new experiment (and your pennies) with us, Mrs. Caporello! 

Do you have any change?

Over the last few days, we've been learning all about change and making change in Math. On Monday, Ms. Riley and Mrs. Gorman transformed our classroom into a mini market and we each had 25 cents to "buy" numerous items from around the store. When students went to pay for their items, they had to work with the cashiers to figure out how much change they should get back-- they needed to make sure they weren't getting shortchanged! One of the tips we've learned while making change is knowing how many coins will fit in another coin/dollar. 

Although the dime is small, it can fit two nickels or ten pennies!

 We discovered the quarter can fit two dimes and a nickel or five nickels! (it could also fit twenty five pennies!)

A dollar can fit four quarters, ten dimes, and twenty nickels! 

When you know how many coins can fit in another coin or a dollar, it makes it easy to count back from the amount you paid to the amount the item cost by counting by ones, fives, tens, or twenty fives. We will continue to do more work with change next week as our schedule was bumped back this week by the storm.