2MW 2024 - 2025

Second graders have spent lots of time this year understanding many strategies and ways to show addition and subtraction with multiple digits up to 1,000. We are seeing a great understanding of the conceptual process - what is really going on with these numbers - when paying attention to place value. At times we hear (and understand!) the question, "When can kids just learn to carry the 1 like we did in the '90's?" The time is now! We will be learning the traditional problem solving strategy (kids will be calling this "vertical form") where we line up the two addends vertically, start in the ones place, and work from right to left, top to bottom. Many parents learned this method when they were in elementary school. We wanted to note a small detail to clear up potential confusion: there are two accepted ways to "carry the 1" with our Eureka Squared math curriculum. One of the ways is above the next column, and the other way is below the next column,...

Throughout the year, we have “Counting Collections” challenges for math. Kids are given a large number of items and given the task to organize them and count them into groups, usually: ones, tens, and hundreds. Then all kinds of fun questions can result: What if you had 100 more? 100 less? What’s the total of your items and this other team’s items? How many more did you count than the team next to you? This builds their number sense, reasoning, and problem solving in a very hands on way. Here are some pictures of our class at work! 

 Each month we work together on a STEM challenge to build our reasoning, teamwork, and problem solving skills. The kids love the challenge and it’s a great way to see the creativity in how kids find solutions! Here are pictures of our partnerships for the January challenge.