In social studies this year, we have been learning about the history of Chicago, using machines as a lens to guide us. Recently, we studied the Great Chicago Fire. Students were fascinated with learning about the second star on the Chicago flag and one of the reasons Chicago is nicknamed the “Second City”. I…
This is not my first blog post about growth mindset. But I find that it comes up every year in different ways in my classroom; as I teach different groups of students, or different content, or different individuals, I continue to learn more about ways of promoting growth mindset, as well as potential barriers that…
Math class is the first academic subject of the day, and in my class, we always try to start with a brain teaser of some kind. Some weeks, it’s a form of equation construction that the kids can each approach on their own level, such as ___ x ____ = 15. The two missing terms…
To culminate our unit on narrative writing we wrote “small moment stories” which were detailed true stories from our own lives. To cap this off, my class had a writing celebration and invited family and friends to join us for a reading. The process leading up to the celebration – choosing a story, revising,…
In my classroom, we are well and truly launched on creating our own worlds! As a culmination of our Earth science unit, our literature studies, and our social studies emphasis this year on government circles of influence, responsibility and authority, each student in our class is designing a world of their own. There are four…
The second grade math group culminated a unit on money by creating their own pretend store. Each student drew 6 items on little pieces of paper, and labeled them with their prices. The prices had to be less than $10. Students were encouraged to choose prices that they could comfortably and automatically compute change for.…