Today, the second graders at NBCS took their first NWEA test, in reading.  They worked hard, and pushed through some challenging questions.  The NWEA assessment is a computer based assessment, and the questions increase or decrease in difficulty based on the accuracy of responses to previous questions.  The second grade will be assessing tomorrow morning, in math!  I am proud of their hard work!

Our Friday STEM challenge was to make the longest link chain that they could, out of a single piece of paper.  We had some great discussions about changing our ways of thinking, when we know that there is a better way of doing something.  This is a difficult concept, when we have made our minds up to do something.  It was fun to see the kids planning, and thinking throughout this challenge.  We debriefed at the end, and discussed what was successful, what was challenging, and what we would do differently next time.  It is great to see their thought process evolving throughout these challenges.

We created some GIANT name collection boxes to reinforce generating equivalent names for numbers.  I asked the kids to challenge themselves, and many of them did!

We completed our first two-day Open Response problem.  I was SUPER impressed with how the kids worked together to solve these problems.  We had some great discussions at the start of day two, and the kids made some great revisions to their work!

I was impressed, how every member of our class stood up to “present” their name tag!  This was a great activity to get their “thinking caps” on and to learn a little bit more about each other!

We had fun practicing using our number grids, by playing a game!  We will continue to practice counting up and back by ten!

This year, we are reaching for the stars!  We have written our hopes and dreams for second grade, and will be working toward making them come true!

These rainbow name-bows came out great!  We worked hard, to figure out good descriptive words for each letter in our names!