Week 4 – Second Grade

Week 4 Second Grade

Game Time! (Fiction, Level 6, Stage 2) by Stuart J. Murphy

The Day the Gorilla Came to School (Fiction, Level 6, Stage 2) by Jeanette Cunis

From Oil to Gas (Non-fiction, Level 6, Stage 2) by Shannon Zemlicka

Gorillas in the classroom, black liquid “gold” coming from deep within the earth, and a math skills-building soccer game – what a great fourth week of 2nd Grade! As usual, we loved all of the books in this week’s kit, but our favorite book this week was From Oil to Gas because of the rich family discussion it prompted over lunch one day about fossil fuels, where they’re located in the world, who put them there, and how long they’ll last. I always love seeing the learning go on even during breaks in the school day!

The activity I want to highlight this week is the Mathematics Activity for Game Time! This book is designed to carry the student through a fictional story about a big soccer game while teaching them all about telling time and using fractions. The Guided Lesson offers one math activity to complete before reading the book and one to complete afterwards. The first activity guides the teacher in providing 4 clock faces and asks the student to divide their clocks into fourths using the minute hand. Then the student is to lightly shade one-fourth of the clock and count the number of hash marks within that fourth (15) and repeat the steps for ½ (30 marks), ¾ (45 marks), and 1 whole (60 marks) so that they understand that 15 minutes are in each fourth of the clock, making 60 minutes a whole hour. The activity provided for completing after reading the book provides several clocks and guides the teacher in asking which hand moved, how many minutes passed, etc. Both of these activities really helped Malachi comprehend time by showing him why we can say there are 60 minutes in each hour, and it also helped him understand fractions by showing him that we use ¼ hour, ½ hour, and ¾ hour all the time – just the same as ¼, ½, and ¾ in math!

For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.